{"id":527,"date":"2008-09-17T22:23:17","date_gmt":"2008-09-18T02:23:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.turtlejournal.com\/?p=527"},"modified":"2008-09-29T21:32:47","modified_gmt":"2008-09-30T01:32:47","slug":"abiogenesis-spontaneous-generation-of-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.turtlejournal.com\/?p=527","title":{"rendered":"Abiogenesis: Spontaneous Generation of Life"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Back in the salad days of youth we laughed in giddy hubris to learn that supposedly brilliant Aristotle had been so foolish to espouse the theory of abiogenesis, the spontaneous generation of life.\u00c2\u00a0 How much more intellgent we were to\u00c2\u00a0know that life could not spontaneously generate from inanimate matter.\u00c2\u00a0 How could those famous Greek philosophers be so silly?\u00c2\u00a0 It fully demonstrated to our proud satisfaction the false premise that human brains had evolve so completely in a mere two thousand years that we high schoolers could out-think the great philosphers of the Golden Age.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.turtlejournal.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/09\/welcome-001-840.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-529\" title=\"welcome-001-840\" src=\"http:\/\/www.turtlejournal.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/09\/welcome-001-840.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"319\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.turtlejournal.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/09\/welcome-001-840.jpg 840w, https:\/\/www.turtlejournal.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/09\/welcome-001-840-300x191.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p style=\"TEXT-ALIGN: center\"><strong><em>Imagine Aristotle Strolling by Just as This Hatchling Emerges from the Sand<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Surprising how much\u00c2\u00a0our intelligence\u00c2\u00a0regresses in maturity.\u00c2\u00a0 The brilliance of youth gets tempered\u00c2\u00a0by wisdom and experience.\u00c2\u00a0 And while we still know that abiogenesis is a failed theory, it&#8217;s a heckuva lot easier to understand how the great minds of the ancient world could be fooled by physical observation.\u00c2\u00a0 If one never happened to spot the female turtle dig and bury her eggs into the ground, and one strolled by just as a perfectly formed hatchling turtle emerged from the sand, one could be forgiven for thinking that you had just witnessed the spontaneous generation of life:\u00c2\u00a0 a turtle springs forth from the sand.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.turtlejournal.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/09\/hatchlings-11-sep-08-002-840.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-530\" title=\"hatchlings-11-sep-08-002-840\" src=\"http:\/\/www.turtlejournal.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/09\/hatchlings-11-sep-08-002-840.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"385\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.turtlejournal.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/09\/hatchlings-11-sep-08-002-840.jpg 840w, https:\/\/www.turtlejournal.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/09\/hatchlings-11-sep-08-002-840-300x231.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p style=\"TEXT-ALIGN: center\"><strong><em>If Aristotle Saw Two Turtles Emerging Would That Change His Mind?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Events such as these are exceedingly rare to witness.\u00c2\u00a0 But over the last decade, I&#8217;ve been privileged to\u00c2\u00a0observe &#8220;spontaneous&#8221; emergence from the sand a handful of times.\u00c2\u00a0 Each occurence reminds me of philosophy class and how nearly two and a half millennia ago our Greek intellectual ancestors had conceived a perfectly logical explanation for this seemingly magical and mysterious event.\u00c2\u00a0 Instead, today we demonstrate our intellectual superiority by telling the tale of the turtle and the egg.\u00c2\u00a0 You know, which one came first, the turtle or the egg?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Back in the salad days of youth we laughed in giddy hubris to learn that supposedly brilliant Aristotle had been so foolish to espouse the theory of abiogenesis, the spontaneous generation of life.\u00c2\u00a0 How much more intellgent we were to\u00c2\u00a0know that life could not spontaneously generate from inanimate matter.\u00c2\u00a0 How could those famous Greek philosophers [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[23],"tags":[373,380,375,377,378,376,381,183,374,379],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turtlejournal.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/527"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turtlejournal.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turtlejournal.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turtlejournal.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turtlejournal.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=527"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.turtlejournal.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/527\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":651,"href":"https:\/\/www.turtlejournal.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/527\/revisions\/651"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turtlejournal.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=527"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turtlejournal.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=527"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turtlejournal.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=527"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}