Mark I. Vuletic

Last updated 21 March 2008

Analysis

The law of biogenesis is generally presented as stipulating that life can only come from previous life. While this may sound like a decisive refutation of the possibility of abiogenesis, it is not so. When one examines the context in which biologists speak of the law of biogenesis, one sees that the law is intended merely as a denial of the old doctrine of spontaneous generation, according to which "smaller organisms could arise spontaneously from mud or organic matter" (Strickberger 1990: 10). Consider this (now amusing) example, by the seventeenth-century physician J. B. Van Helmont, as quoted by Monroe Strickberger:

If you press a piece of underwear soiled with sweat together with some wheat in an open mouth jar, after about 21 days the odor changes and the ferment, coming out of the underwear and penetrating through the husks of wheat into mice. But what is more remarkable is that mice of both sexes emerge, and these mice successfully reproduce with mice born naturally from parents...But what is even more remarkable is that the mice which come out of the wheat are not small mice, not even miniature adults or aborted mice, but adult mice emerge! (Strickberger 1990: 11)

It is this kind of thing that the law of biogenesis is meant to rule out. It should be readily apparent to everyone that modern origin-of-life hypotheses bear no analogy to ideas like adult mice somehow being generated from wheat and soiled underwear.

Perhaps after origin-of-life researchers have explored every avenue, it may turn out that the law of biogenesis should in fact be taken to be universal. But to take the law to have such a scope now, when origin-of-life studies are still relatively new and progressing just fine, would be an invalid extension of the law to a domain it was never intended to cover.

References

Strickberger MW. 2000. Evolution. Boston: Jones and Bartlett.