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Pasteur invented the swan-necked flask to create an environment known not to grow microorganisms. After
sterilizing a nutrient broth in these flasks, he removed the swan necks of the controls. Microorganisms grew
only in the controls, refuting spontaneous generation.[1]
Pasteur's experiment is generally agreed to have decisively refuted the theory of spontaneous
generation in 1859.[4] Disproof of the traditional ideas of spontaneous generation is no longer
controversial among professional biologists. By the middle of the 19th century, the theory
of biogenesis had accumulated so much evidential support, due to the work of Louis Pasteur and
others, that the alternative theory of spontaneous generation had been effectively disproven. The
historian of science John Desmond Bernal suggests that earlier theories such as spontaneous
generation were based upon an explanation that life was continuously created as a result of chance
events.[5][6][7]
Contents
[hide]
1Description
2Pre-Aristotelian philosophers
3Aristotle
4After Aristotle
5In Christianity
6Modern tests
o 6.1Pasteur and Tyndall
7See also
8References
Description[edit]
Spontaneous generation refers both to the supposed processes in which different types of life might
repeatedly emerge from specific sources other than seeds, eggs or parents, and also to the
theoretical principles which were presented in support of any such phenomena. Crucial to this
doctrine is the idea that life comes from non-life, with the conditions, and that no causal agent is
needed (i.e. Parent). Such hypothetical processes sometimes are referred to as abiogenesis, in
which life routinely emerges from non-living matter on a time scale of anything from minutes to
weeks, or perhaps a season or so. An example would be the supposed seasonal generation of mice
and other animals from the mud of the Nile.[8] Such ideas have no operative principles in common
with the modern hypothesis of abiogenesis, in which life emerged in the early ages of the planet,
over a time span of at least millions of years, and subsequently diversified without evidence that
there ever has been any subsequent repetition of the event.[citation needed]
Another version of spontaneous generation is variously termed univocal
generation, heterogenesis or xenogenesis, in which one form of life has been supposed to arise from
a different form, such as tapeworms from the bodies of their hosts.[9]
In the years following Louis Pasteur's experiment in 1862, the term "spontaneous generation" fell
into increasing disfavor. Experimentalists used a variety of terms for the study of the origin of life
from non-living materials. Heterogenesis was applied to once-living materials such as boiled broths,
and Henry Charlton Bastian proposed the term archebiosis for life originating from inorganic
materials. The two were lumped together as "spontaneous generation", but disliking the term as
sounding too random, Bastian proposed biogenesis. In an 1870 address titled, "Spontaneous
Generation", Thomas Henry Huxleydefined biogenesis as life originating from other life and coined
the negative of the term, abiogenesis, which was the term that became dominant.[10]
Pre-Aristotelian philosophers[edit]
As part of his overall attempt to give natural explanations of things that had previously been ascribed
to the agency of the gods, Anaximander believed that everything arose out of the elemental nature
of the universe, which he called the "apeiron" or "unbounded". According to Hippolytus of Rome in
the third century CE, Anaximander claimed that living creatures were first formed in the "wet" when
acted on by the Sun, and that they were different then than they are now. For example, he claimed
humans, in a different form, must have earlier been born mature like other animals, or they would not
have survived. Anaximander also claimed that spontaneous generation continued to this day, with
aquatic forms being produced directly from lifeless matter.[11]
Anaximenes, a pupil of Anaximander, thought that air was the element that imparted life, motion and
thought, and speculated that there was a primordial terrestrial slime, a mixture of earth and water,
which when combined with the sun's heat formed plants, animals and human beings directly.[11]
Xenophanes traced the origin of man back to the transitional period between the fluid stage of the
earth and the formation of land. He too held to a spontaneous generation of fully formed plants and
animals under the influence of the sun.[11]
Empedocles accepted the spontaneous generation of life, but held that there had to be trials of
combinations of parts of animals that spontaneously arose. Successful combinations formed the
species we now see, unsuccessful forms failed to reproduce.[11]
Anaxagoras also adopted a terrestrial slime account, although he thought that the seeds of plants
existed in the air from the beginning, and of animals in the aether.[11]
Aristotle[edit]
Main article: Aristotle's biology
Aristotle laid the foundations of Western natural philosophy. In his book, The History of Animals, he
stated in no uncertain terms:
Now there is one property that animals are found to have in common with plants. For some plants
are generated from the seed of plants, whilst other plants are self-generated through the formation of
some elemental principle similar to a seed; and of these latter plants some derive their nutriment
from the ground, whilst others grow inside other plants, as is mentioned, by the way, in my treatise
on Botany. So with animals, some spring from parent animals according to their kind, whilst others
grow spontaneously and not from kindred stock; and of these instances of spontaneous generation
some come from putrefying earth or vegetable matter, as is the case with a number of insects, while
others are spontaneously generated in the inside of animals out of the secretions of their several
organs.[12]
Numerous forms were attributed to various sources. The testaceans (shelled molluscs) are
characterized by forming by spontaneous generation in mud, but differ based upon the material they
grow in for example, clams and scallops in sand, oysters in slime, and the barnacle and
the limpet in the hollows of rocks. Some reddish worms form from long-standing snow which has
turned reddish. Another grub was said to grow out of fire.[12]
Concerning sexual reproduction, Aristotle argued that the male parent provided the "form," or soul,
that guided development through semen, and the female parent contributed unorganized matter,
allowing the embryo to grow.[14]
After Aristotle[edit]
Vitruvius, a Roman architect and writer of the 1st century BCE, advised that libraries be placed
facing eastwards to benefit from morning light, but not towards the south or the west as those winds
generate bookworms.[15]
Aristotle claimed that eels were lacking in sex and lacking milt, spawn and the passages for
either.[16] Rather, he asserted eels emerged from earthworms.[17] Later authors dissented. Pliny the
Elder did not argue against the anatomic limits of eels, but stated that eels reproduce by budding,
scraping themselves against rocks, liberating particles that become eels.[18] Athenaeus described
eels as entwining and discharging a fluid which would settle on mud and generate life. On the other
hand, Athenaeus also dissented towards spontaneous generation, claiming that a variety
of anchovy did not generate from roe, as Aristotle stated, but rather, from sea foam.[19]
In Christianity[edit]