The 1660s were an amazing time to be alive. Sure, the plague was going around and flushable toilets were few and far between, but the science was revolutionary! In fact, scientific work in this decade helped reshape the way we understand what it means to be alive.

Question

By the mid-1600s, many scientists had rejected the idea that animals like mice and eels come from nonliving, or inanimate, objects. However, it was still believed that smaller, simpler organisms were born through spontaneous generation.

For example, maggots were thought to be “born” directly from rotting meat. Before microscopes were invented, the bodies and behavior of small organisms were difficult to observe. Because scientists couldn’t see the reproductive processes of organisms like maggots and flies, spontaneous generation seemed like the only explanation for their origin.

In 1668, Italian scientist Francesco Redi decided to test this hypothesis. To do this, he put fresh meat in three jars. He left one jar open, covered one in gauze (a thin fabric with very small holes), and sealed the final jar.

After a few days, there were flies and maggots on the meat in the open jar. However, there were no flies or maggots on the meat in the gauze-covered and sealed jars. What’s more, flies appeared on the gauze before maggots did. Maggots didn’t come from raw meat, they came from flies!

Redi’s work was more than a gross collection of rotten meat and maggots (though it probably did smell pretty bad). With the results of his experiment, Redi was able to reject the theory of spontaneous generation, famously concluding that “All life comes from life.”

make ur observation, but like a 7th grader doing it but still make it casually good. make it also answer the corresponding question "where do cells come from"

Answer 1

So, the 1660s were a wild time, and not just because of the plague and weird toilets. There were some seriously cool scientific breakthroughs happening! One of the biggest debates back then was about where tiny living things, like maggots, actually came from. People thought that little critters just popped out of stuff like rotting meat all on their own—this idea was called spontaneous generation. But that didn’t really make sense if you thought about it!

Enter Francesco Redi, who was like, “Hold up, let’s figure this out.” In 1668, he did a pretty neat experiment. He took some fresh meat and put it in three jars: one jar was wide open, one was covered with gauze, and the last one was sealed tight. After a few days, guess what? The open jar was crawling with flies and maggots, but the other two jars stayed totally clean. Even cooler, the flies landed on the gauze before any maggots showed up, which meant the maggots came from the flies, not the meat.

Redi's big takeaway was, “All life comes from life.” This actually changed how people thought about living things. So, if we relate this back to cells—which are basically the building blocks of all living things—this means that cells come from other cells. Just like Redi figured out that maggots come from flies, we know now that all living things, including all the tiny cells in our bodies, come from other living things. It's like a big, crazy family tree of life! Pretty awesome, right?