Abstract
During the second part of the XIXth century, the spontaneous generation controversy was at its height. Louis Pasteur (1822–1895) concluded from his experiments that the appearance of microorganisms was produced not by spontaneous generation but rather by germs present in the atmosphere (Pasteur, 1860). However the French coup de grâce of Pasteur did not completely kill the doctrine of spontaneous generation, which continued to be debated as far as 1900. In particular, this new theory didn’t solve the problem of the origin of the first living organisms, within the context of the theory of transformism and biological evolution. If life has always derived from living organisms, where did primitive life come from ?
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© 2001 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Raulin-Cerceau, F. (2001). Theories on Origins of Life between 1860 and 1900. In: Chela-Flores, J., Owen, T., Raulin, F. (eds) First Steps in the Origin of Life in the Universe. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-1017-7_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-1017-7_6
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