Pasteur proved life only comes from life (law of biogenesis)
From EvoWiki
Contents |
Claim
Pasteur and other scientists disproved the concept of spontaneous generation and established that life comes only from previous life.
Source
- Anon, 1985. Life--How Did It Get Here? Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of New York, Inc., p. 38.
Responses
- The idea of spontaneous generation was based on ancient superstition rather than any scientific research. But scientific research has indeed been done on the issue of how life may have originated billions of years ago.
- According to the hypothesis of spontaneous generation, highly developed contemporary life forms can arise from unliving organic matter, for example, mice can arise from rotting wheat and straw, frogs can arise from marsh mud, and maggots can arise from from rotting meat; according to the theory of abiogenesis, some sort of self-perpetuating, self-reproducing chemical reaction(s) which might be termed "life" can arise from inanimate matter. Therefore, while it's true that Pasteur's experiments refuted the hypothesis of spontaneous generation, it's equally true that Pasteur's experiments simply did not address the question of abiogenesis.
- Spontaneous generation was much more narrowly defined than abiogenesis and at the time of Pasteur most of the other ideas involved in abiogenesis were still undiscovered. Pasteur thus disproved a particular mechanism of abiogenesis, not the broad one considered today.
- The scientific method cannot "disprove" anything. It can only go so far as to say "extremely unlikely." If a paper was submitted which claimed to "disprove" something or other it would be rejected for publication.
- This is prime example of not understanding what "life" is. The arguer does not realize that all things in the universe is made up of a combination of elements that we find on the periodic table. These elements are very much non-living. These elements combine together in different proportions to form water, clouds, stars, volcanoes and all life forms. Now, at what point a clump of elements ceases to be just a clump of elements and starts becoming a "life" form is a relatively arbitrary definition that we set. In reality, there is no magical line that separates a clump of elements and another clump of elements that we deem "life." In other words, since life is made from non-life elements, then life must have arose from non-life. Just as clouds arose from non-cloud elements (air and water molecules), and stars arose from non-star elements (swirls of gas).
Fallacies contained in this claim
- Equivocation (spontaneous generation is confused with similar-sounding abiogenesis)
External links
- biogenesis--Law of biogenesis. Cambridge Encyclopedia, 2008.
Related claims
- The odds of life forming are incredibly small
- Even the simplest life is incredibly complex
- First cells couldn't come together by chance
- Why isn't new life still being generated today?
- Abiogenesis is speculative, without evidence
- Abiogenesis has never been observed
- Evolution is baseless without a theory of abiogenesis
See Also
Why is Creationism not a Scientific Theory?
