Spontaneous generation refers to the idea that living creatures can arise from nonliving matter. Before microscopes enabled people to view forms of life too small to see with the naked eye, the origins of many living things were a mystery. People often...

From the seventeenth century, through the Middle Ages, and until the late nineteenth century, it was generally accepted that some organisms originated directly from nonliving matter. Such "spontaneous generation" appeared to start in...

Spontaneous generation, which is also called biopoesis or abiogenesis, is the process of living organisms arising de novo from non-living material. Until the nineteenth century, it was believed that spontaneous generation was the process by which many...

According to the ancient theory of spontaneous generation, living organisms could originate from nonliving matter. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, however, naturalists began to conduct experiments that challenged the doctrine of...

Abiogenesis (Greek a-bio-genesis, "non biological origins") is the formation of life from non-living matter. Today the term is primarily used to refer to the chemical origin of life, such as from a 'primordial soup' or in the vicinity of hydrothermal...