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Spontaneous generation __________
Disproval of spontaneous generation
Reflection about theory of spontaneous generation
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Louis Pasteur: The Spontaneous Man
Spontaneous Generation thought to be the Origin of Life until the 1850's. Through a Science Fair that was sponsored by the French Academy of Science, it was Louis Pasteur who was responsible for disapproving this myth.
Introduction
This paper is about an extraordinary gentleman who made many discoveries in his lifetime; however, this will not be about one of his discovery’s rather the experiment that debunks spontaneous generation. One may want to ask what is spontaneous generation, and how was it discovered. These will be my main two main points for my paper along with a brief description of Louis Pasteur. For now I will give a small introduction as to what is spontaneous generation and some of the thought process before the discovery. For millennia, the Origin of Life was thought to be that organic life could and did arise from inorganic matter. In the late 17th century, there were duplications of how to “create life”. One for instance was to take sweaty rags, wrap them around wheat, set them in and open air jar and in 21 days, you would have created mice. All over the world, in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas, mankind was formulating recipes for "creating" bees, lice, scorpions, maggots, worms, frogs, etc. (Life, Origin of)
Materials and Methods
Since the internet is like a library except without the late book fees, I was able to use this as my main support for my research. As stated in my previous research paper I started with Wikipedia however, knowing that Wikipedia is not a reliable source of information, I used the resources given there to find the rest of my information. I read numerous sites about Louis Pasteur, even though I didn’t cite them; again I found the m...
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...medicine such as stereochemistry, microbiology, bacteriology, virology, immunology, and molecular biology. Moreover, his work has protected millions of people from disease through vaccination and pasteurization.
Works Cited
Barnett, Brendon. "History of Louis Pasteur." Pasteurbrewing.com. Web. http://www.pasteurbrewing.com/biography/biography/history-of-louis-pasteur/78.html. Accessed 15 July 2011
Media, Mott. "Louis Pasteur." Garden of Praise. Web. http://gardenofpraise.com/ibdpast.html. Accessed 15 July 2011.
Life, Origin of. "Origin Of Life." Science - AllAboutScience.org. Web. http://www.allaboutscience.org/origin-of-life.html. Accessed 15 July 2011.
Rhee, Seung Yon. "Louis Pasteur (1822-1895)." Access Excellence @ the National Health Museum. Access Excellence. Web. http://www.accessexcellence.org/RC/AB/BC/Louis_Pasteur.php. Accessed 15 July 2011
"Charles Darwin: The Father of Evolution." Darwin1. University of Missouri, n.d. Web. 04 May 2014.
The Origin of Life has long been debated about. In result to that there are many hypotheses that each claim that’s how life started. Some of them claim life came from space, others from clay and even hydrothermal vents. However, they’re only theories which is why many experiments and research going into proving them. Many great minds such as Alexander Oparin, Gunter Wachtershauser, Robert Vrijenhoek and Louis Pasteur are the brains behind the hypotheses which is what makes them even more interesting to test out. The hypotheses that I researched were the Primordial Soup Hypothesis, the Iron-Sulfur World Hypothesis, the Deep Sea Vent Hypothesis, the RNA World Hypothesis, the Community Clay Hypothesis and the Panspermia Hypothesis.
Louis Pasteur was a famous scientist throughout the 1800s. He is known for his advancements in vaccination, microbial fermentation, and pasteurization. He is also known for his breakthroughs concerning disease prevention. He had a wide range of discoveries and advancements, these can be traced by going through the main points in his lifetime which were: his early life, professional career, research contributions of the Germ Theory, contributions to immunology and vaccination, and the honors and wards he received for all of his achievements.
According to the theory of evolution, approximately 3.8 billion years ago some chemicals accidentally structured themselves into a self-replicating molecule. This beginning spark of life was the ancestor of every living thing we see today. Through the processes of mutation and natural selection, that simplest life form, has been shaped into every living species.
Louis Pasteur was born in Dole, France in 1822. He was born the son of a poor tanner, so growing up his social status was low. However, he was able to go to school. At first, though, he did not study science he studied math. He then studied science in eastern France, when in college, and his professor even said that he was “mediocre in chemistry” (Hart). After receiving his doctorate in 1847 he was quick, however to prove that his professor had been quite wrong. His research regarding isomers of tartaric acid made his name well known around the world by the age of only 26.
The origin of the selfish gene, and of evolution itself, began in something Dawkins calls the "primeval soup," where protein molecules, by pure chance, bonded together to form "replicators," the ancestors of DNA (198).
A remarkable breakthrough in medicine occurred in the late 1800s through the work of Louis Pasteur. Pasteur's experiments showed that bacteria reproduce like other living things and travel from place to place. Using the results of his findings, he developed pasteurization, which is the process of heating liquids to kill bacteria and prevent fermentation. He also produced an anthrax vaccine as well as a way to weaken the rabies virus. After studying Pasteur's work, Joseph Lister developed antisepsis, which is the process of killing disease-causing germs.
Biological evolution is descent with modification. Theories of evolution have their roots in early Greek and Roman culture. Before seventh century B.C.E., people believed that supernatural forces were responsible for life. Philosophers Plato and Aristotle argued against this doctrine. They used logic to explain the origins of life. It was commonly accepted that the earth was only a few thousand years old, species were immutable, and that life is arranged linearly. In the seventh century, naturalist John Ray used the term “species” as the basic unit of classification. In the eighteenth century, Carolus Linnaeus created a hierarchical classification system for organizing species based on resemblance using phylogenetic trees. In 1809, French theorist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck published his theory of inheritance of acquired traits. In 1830, Charles Lyell introduced uniformitarianism as the mechanism for evolution; the theory that states that geologic change is relatively constant. In the mid-nineteenth century, Alfred Wallace and Charles Darwin both individually conceived natural selection as the mechanism for evolution. Darwin received credit for the theory of natural selection because he published his book, On the Origin of Species, before Wallace. In 1865, Gregor Mendel is the founder of modern genetics through his work with pea plant crosses. To this day, the work of Mendel and Darwin are widely accepted.
Only in the past one hundred years have men finally put aside their Biblical and mythical tales about creation, and looked to the facts in order to piece together a logical explanation for the origin of mankind. In turn, men were now able to explain the enigma of their origin without the presence of a supernatural being responsible for their creation. At the head of a slew of men trying to uncover logical reasons for mans derivation was Charles Darwin. Darwin was the most accomplished of these men because he was able to put forth a logical conjecture that was based upon facts and observations. This theory, for a short time, was able to end the feud among educated men because many now put their trust in this new “theory of evolution”. Unfortunately, this revolutionary new theory threatened the religious beliefs about creation and soon a new rivalry emerged between the creationists and evolutionists.
This first chapter starts with Darwin’s ideas of species, developing this new theory “on the origin of species”.
"Early Theories of Evolution: Darwin and Natural Selection." Early Theories of Evolution: Darwin and Natural Selection. N.p., n.d. Web. 16 Mar. 2014. .
“The greatest mystery of existence is existence itself” (Chopra). Chopra, a world-renowned author, perceives the existence of life as a truly mystifying cerebration. The pending question that many scientist, and even theists, attempt to answer is how life ultimately began. Currently, the mystery is left with two propositions, evolution and creation. While both approaches attempt to answer the origins of life, evolution and creation are two contrasting concepts. Evolution views life to be a process by which organisms diversified from earlier forms whereas creation illustrates that life was created by a supernatural being. Creation and evolution both agree on the existence of microevolution and the resemblance of apes and humans but vary in terms of interpreting the origins of the life through a historical standpoint. A concept known as Faith Vs Fact comprehensively summarizes the tone of this debate, which leads the question of how life began.
Ancient thinkers speculated that life originated spontaneously from inorganic components of the environment, just after the formation of earth. A series of physio-chemical processes were perhaps responsible behind this creation. Aristotle (384 BC to 322 BC) was the pioneer in this line of thought and nobody raised any voice against his speculation till seventeenth Century. But in seventeenth Century, an Italian scientist, Francesco Redi (1627 -1697) made an experiment with two pieces of
...of ancient prokaryotes into eukaryotic cells which gives rise to the present-day model of life is wondrous enough, but the fact that the organelles work in such efficient harmony, seemingly directed like well crafted machinery is another ponderous development. The layout of life begins with the cell. Without it there is no life even on a microscopic level. To imagine that giant beasts of the Jurassic and Triassic periods such Triceratops and Liopleurodon being sharing the same base parts as some as infinitesimally small as an amoeba or a plankton is astonishing. What's more amazing though is the fact it is readily provable and verifiable. In the study of life, the make up of all creature is known at a basic level. Even without the the scientists to explain the facts, the facts themselves are immutable in terms of defining the make up and rules of existence of life.
How life originated on earth is a question that people have wondered for ages. One possibility that answer this brilliant question is the panspermia theory, which suggests that life on earth originated thanks to the contribution of cosmic beings that come from any point in the universe. This hypothesis does not speak of organisms ranging in meteorites moving through the universe to the Earth to conquer it, but it speaks of complex chemical substances which had been formed earlier from the origins of the universe, which reached the earth at any given time.