The ancient Greeks believed in the spontaneous generation of life. More recently, Louis Pasteur showed that life did not arise from non-living material. Yet those who deny the Creator's existence must believe it happened once upon a time.

False or unsubstantiated rumors, once established, achieve a life of their own. One example is that life has been found on Mars.

An intriguing development in recent evolutionary thought has been the growing repudiation of neo-Darwinian orthodoxy (that is, the idea of slow and gradual evolution, accomplished by the mechanism of small random genetic mutations preserved by natural selection) in favor of the idea of rapid evolution caused by rapid environmental changes.