BIOL 1001 Chapter : Chapter 17 Lecture Notes
Document Summary
The history of life: spontaneous generation is the proposal that living organisms can arise from nonliving matter, medieval beliefs reflected the concept of spontaneous generation. Maggots were thought to arise from meat. Microbes were thought to arise from broth. Mice were thought to arise from mixtures of sweaty shirts and wheat: 17. 1 how did life begin, experiments refuted spontaneous generation. The maggots-from-meat idea was disproved by francesco redi in. No maggots developed when he kept flies away from uncontaminated meat. The broth-to-microorganism idea was disproved by louis pasteur and. Microorganisms did not appear in sterile broth unless the broth was first exposed to existing microorganisms in the surrounding environment: did spontaneous generation occur on early earth, pasteur did not prove that spontaneous generation never happened. He showed only that it does not happen under present-day conditions in an oxygen-rich atmosphere.
