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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.
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.
The next theory that he disproved was the “Primordial Soup Theory”. Sir Fred Hoyle scoffed at the ridiculous atheistic notion when he said, “The notion that a living cell could be arrived at by chance in a primordial organic soup here on earth is evidently nonsense of a high order.” “There was no primeval soup, neither on this planet, nor on any other, and if the beginning of life were not random, life must therefore have been the product of purposeful intelligence” (Donyes
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.
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.
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.
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 master and maker in many fields, Linus Pauling lived a very long and productive life spanning nearly the entire twentieth century. By the time he was in his twenties, he had made a name for himself as a scientist. After many significant contributions including his work on the nature of the chemical bond, he turned to chemical biology and is generally accepted as the founder of molecular biology. Later in his life he became very involved in issues of politics and peace for which he is somewhat less well known. In his later years, he became interested in health and medicine and specifically in the use of vitamin C to prevent ailments from the common cold to cancer.
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.
“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.
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. .
Pasteur was born on December 27, 1822 in a little town called Dôle in the foothills of the Jura Mountains of eastern France. When he was five years old his family moved to Arbois where he grew up with his father, mother, and three sisters. While attending primary school Pasteur was only an average student. Some considered him to be slow because he worked so hard on an exercise problem to make sure that he had the right answer. While in high school Monsieur Romanet, Pasteur’s principal, became interested in Pasteur and began to help him with his studies. With this encouragement Pasteur became a very good student. The principal suggested that he aim to attend Ecole Normale in Paris where he could become a professor at one of the great universities, however his father felt that this was far-fetched and preferred that Pasteur attend a more local school (Burton, 5-7).
...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.
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