quote:
I'm afraid I'm still a little hazy on the distinction between spontaneous generation and abiogenesis.
Defender,
Spontaneous generation was/is the idea that living organisms are produced by certain physical processes, like decay. For example, consider a lump of meat. As that meat ages and decays, you'll start to see squiggly, squirmy, cuddly maggots. The idea behind spontaneous generation is that the meat itself, as it decays, converts directly into the maggots. This is the idea that Pasteur debunked. Abiogenesis is the idea that simple molecules began to catalyze themselves-- quite a few molecules can do this-- and, over hundreds of millions of years, the better autocatalysts dominated and we call those survivors 'life.'
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