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Very Short Answer Questions · Q3

Q.What is biogenesis?

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[!ANSWER] Biogenesis is the principle that life comes only from pre-existing life.

Before biogenesis was established, many believed in spontaneous generation (abiogenesis) — the idea that living things such as maggots or microbes could arise suddenly and directly from non-living matter like rotting meat or stale broth. This idea was overturned by careful experimentation, most famously Louis Pasteur's swan-neck flask experiments, which showed that a sterilised nutrient broth remained free of microbial growth indefinitely as long as it was protected from airborne organisms, but grew microbes as soon as it was exposed to ordinary air or contaminated with dust. This demonstrated that the microbes were not generated by the broth itself, but were introduced from pre-existing organisms in the environment.

Biogenesis is now a foundational principle of biology: every cell arises from a pre-existing cell (cell theory), and every organism arises from pre-existing parent organisms, whether by sexual or asexual reproduction.

[!ANSWER] Biogenesis is the principle that living organisms arise only from other pre-existing living organisms, never spontaneously from non-living matter — established against the older idea of spontaneous generation, notably by Pasteur's swan-neck flask experiments.

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