Abiogenesis? ‘Spontaneous generation’ was a mainstream scientific doctrine for a very long time, until proven wrong by Francesco Redi and Louis Pasteur. Even then it died a slow and painful death. Spontaneous generation basically proposed that given the right conditions and precursors, life would arise all by itself ‘spontaneously’. There were various recipes for this well-established ‘fact’ of science. For example, 17th Century Flemish chemist Jan Baptiste van Helmont wrote, ‘If a soiled shirt is placed in the opening of a vessel containing grains of wheat, the reaction of the leaven in the shirt with fumes from the wheat will, after approximately 21 days, transform the wheat into mice.’ It was also thought that meat left to rot would spontaneously give rise to maggots and flies. The self-evident fact that rotting meat would before long swarm with maggots and flies established the belief in spontaneous generation of maggots and flies from rotting meat. Redi proposed an eminently simple experiment to test the hypothesis: let’s cover the meat with some fine material and see what happens! Well of course no maggots or flies swarmed on the meat as it rotted because no flies could get to the meat to lay their eggs and thus produce the maggots and flies that were so well known. And so Redi overthrew long-established scientific doctrine and replaced it with a new doctrine, ‘Life comes from life’—what became known as the ‘law of biogenesis’. Pasteur banged the final nail in the coffin of spontaneous generation when he carried out his famous swan-necked beaker experiment. He placed sterilized meat broth in his beaker, then heated the thin neck of the beaker and bent it downward like the neck of a swan. While the bent neck allowed air to get to the broth, it stopped anything dropping into the broth from the air. His broth stayed clear for a year, establishing that sterilised broth open to the air, without any protection as per the swan neck, was contaminated by pre-existing life forms falling into it from the air, even though these were invisible to the naked eye. Again it was established that ‘Life comes from life’, and spontaneous generation fell into disrepute. But it’s amazing what a name change can do to revive a cadaver dead and buried. Political parties reinvent themselves by name changes. And old worn-out failed policies, and politicians decked out in new drag, are dished up to a gullible public as the very latest in progressive politics. The same happened with spontaneous generation. T. H. Huxley gave it a new ‘scientific’ name, made some cosmetic changes (limiting it to the origin of the first life), and as a result it’s been resurrected and made respectable again … now known as ‘abiogenesis’. Abiogenesis means ‘no biologic origin’, in simple parlance, life from non-life … and thus we’re back to spontaneous generation, but in new guise … given the right conditions and precursors, life will arise spontaneously. And this despite attempts by advocates to differentiate between the terms. And so ‘abiogenesis’ gets a pass and is promoted in august scientific journals, and popular magazines such as New Zealand Geographic (Issue 126, March–April 2014, p. 28); even though ‘spontaneous generation’ has been thoroughly debunked, and the disproving of it taught as a triumph of careful science over superstition. Further, billion-dollar expeditions and experiments are conducted to seek to establish that life occurred abiogenically. The main impetus for the US space program is to search for life in the solar system and beyond.
