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How can the events in space and time Life is a self-sustaining chemical system
which take place within the spatial boundary capable of Darwinian evolution.
of a living organism be accounted for by
- Gerald Joyce (Scripps Research Institute)
physics and chemistry?
- Erwin Schrdinger, What is Life (1944)
What is life? Only three simple words, and yet life is a particular set of processes that
out of them spins a universe of questions that are result from the organization of matter
no less challenging. What precisely is it that
separates the animate from the inanimate? What life resists a
are the basic ingredients of life? Where did life first simple, one-
stir? How did the first organisms evolve? Is there sentence
life everywhere? To what extent is life scattered definition
across the cosmos? If other kinds of creatures do
exist on exoplanets, are they as intelligent as we
are, or even more so? yet we can
recognize life
- J. Craig Venter, Life at the Speed of Light (2013) by what living
things do
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Biology 1 Lecture 1
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Biology 1 Lecture 1
Thousands to
millions of years
of natural selection
Ancestral canine
Physical entities with some of the characters of Physical entities with some of the characters of
living organisms: viruses living organisms: viroids
obligate intracellular parasites plant pathogens composed of molecules of
made up of nucleic acid enclosed in a protein coat naked circular RNA only several hundred
sometimes wrapped in a membranous envelope nucleotides long
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Biology 1 Lecture 1
Microscopic image of a
tissue sample from
human brain showing a
clump of infectious
prions
SCIENTIFIC INQUIRY
Scientific Process
Observation - Careful observation of a
process or phenomenon
Hypothesis - Guess concerning the
observation
May generate multiple hypotheses.
Prediction - Expected consequences of a
correct hypothesis
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Biology 1 Lecture 1
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Biology 1 Lecture 1
decaying meat
maggots
decaying meat
Pasteur 2. Biogenesis
conducted broth
experiments that
rejected the idea proposed by Rudolf Virchow in the 1850s
of spontaneous
generation living organisms whether simple or
complex can arise only from preexisting
living organisms
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Biology 1 Lecture 1
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Biology 1 Lecture 1
major debates also concern where life evolved 5. Interplanetary or Cosmozoic Theory
- shallow water or moist sediments
- deep sea vents life originated on a distant planet
the most important reason for invoking an
extraterrestrial origin for life, probably in a
hydrothermal habitat, is that such an origin
provides a greater timespan for early
evolution than has been available on Earth
Panspermia is applied to the possible
dispersion of life throughout the galaxy
Directed panspermia describes the deliberate
seeding of life on Earth by intelligent beings
Copyright 2002 Pearson Education, Inc., publishing as Benjamin Cummings
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Biology 1 Lecture 1
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