Origin of Life: Panspermia vs Spontaneous Generation — NEET Biology
📚 Practice ConceptDid life come from outerspace? Some scientists believe that it came from outside. Early Greek thinkers thought units of life called spores were transferred to different planets including earth. 'Panspermia' is still a favourite idea for some astronomers. For a long time it was also believed that life came out of decaying and rotting matter like straw, mud, etc. This was the theory of spontaneous generation. Louis Pasteur by careful experimentation demonstrated that life comes only from pre-existing life. He showed that in pre-sterilised flasks, life did not come from killed yeast while in another flask open to air, new living organisms arose from 'killed yeast'. Spontaneous generation theory was dismissed once and for all. However, this did not answer how the first life form came on earth.
Which of the following statements regarding the theory of spontaneous generation and its refutation are NOT correct? S1. The theory of spontaneous generation proposed that life arose spontaneously from non-living, decaying, and rotting matter. S2. Louis Pasteur's experiments definitively demonstrated that life could only arise from pre-existing life. S3. Pasteur's setup involved pre-sterilised flasks where life did not appear, even when exposed to 'killed yeast' and open to air. S4. The dismissal of spontaneous generation paved the way for the acceptance of chemical evolution as the origin of the first life form. S5. While Pasteur disproved spontaneous generation for complex organisms, he supported the idea for microbial life forms.
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