Live Science Spotlights Abiogenesis, Life Emerging More Than 3.7 Billion Years Ago

3 articles · Updated · Livescience.com · Jul 22

Live Science named “abiogenesis” its science word of the day, defining it as life emerging from nonliving matter through chemical processes.
More than 3.7 billion years ago, such a process may have produced Earth’s first life, though scientists still do not know exactly how it happened.
Leading ideas include lightning-driven reactions in water, methane, ammonia and hydrogen, as well as chemistry around deep-sea vents that could form amino acids and sugars.
The feature distinguishes abiogenesis from spontaneous generation, the discredited belief that organisms arose directly from decaying matter.
Louis Pasteur overturned that older idea in the 1860s by showing microbes grow only from preexisting microbes, framing abiogenesis as a separate question about life’s earliest origin.