Definition of Spontaneous Generation

The philosophers of antiquity, especially Aristotle, reflected on the mechanisms that govern nature. For Aristotle the plants and animals form an organized set in which each piece is oriented to a specific purpose. This view of nature is known as teleologism and is based on a general principle: all living things have a telos, that is, an end.

On the other hand, Aristotle believed in the idea of ​​a spontaneous generation. This means that life can be created freely from the action of the non-living. Thus, the heat of the Sun could trigger natural processes that ended in the formation of a certain plant or animal species.

The theory of spontaneous generation was not a vision of the past, but persisted for a long period of time.

A theory that began to weaken from the seventeenth century

With the invention of microscope the study of nature acquired a new dimension. In the seventeenth century, the Italian naturalist Francesco Redi demonstrated that worms did not generate spontaneously in the rotten meat, but rather the flies landed on the meat and laid their eggs which eventually turned into maggots. However, this advance was not enough to make the idea of ​​spontaneous generation disappear. Scientists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries believed that living phenomena were made up of vital atoms and that a dying

living being these atoms were grouped again to form another living being.

In the 19th century, the French scientist Louis Pasteur again questioned the theory of spontaneous generation. In his experiments he placed organic material in three different ways: in one the matter was hermetically enclosed in a glass, in another the matter was in a slightly open glass and in a third the matter was in a glass completely open.

He observed that in the first and second groups there was no type of contamination and there were only new living beings in the third group. With these conclusions, the theory of spontaneous generation began a period of disappearance in the scientific community.

A new theory

In the field professional obsolete scientific models are replaced by others that are more accurate and true to the facts. The initial alternative to spontaneous generation was a new paradigm, the biogenesis. This theory is based on a basic principle: any form of life is only created from a life that already exists.

Between one theory and the other, the proposal of biogenesis finally won out. From it it was possible to explain other phenomena of nature, such as genetic mutations, the carbon cycle or the metabolism.

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