Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun Production by an external cause — that is, a cause different from the effect. Also called heterogeny.
  • noun In biology: The spontaneous generation of animals and vegetables low in the scale of organization from inorganic elements; abiogenesis.
  • noun That kind of generation in which the parent, whether plant or animal, produces offspring differing in structure and habit from itself, but in which after one or more generations the original form reappears.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun (Biol.) Spontaneous generation, so called.
  • noun (Biol.) That method of reproduction in which the successive generations differ from each other, the parent organism producing offspring different in habit and structure from itself, the original form, however, reappearing after one or more generations; -- opposed to homogenesis, or gamogenesis.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun biology Abnormal organic development.
  • noun biology The birth of a living being from a parent of a different kind; having two different forms in the life cycle.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun the alternation of two or more different forms in the life cycle of a plant or animal

Etymologies

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Examples

  • Stagnant pools were found full of them, and the obvious difficulty of assigning a germinal origin to existences so minute furnished the precise condition necessary to give new play to the notion of heterogenesis or spontaneous generation.

    Fragments of science, V. 1-2 John Tyndall 1856

  • But he does have a table of contents, so let's try that: 1. On the production of subjectivity 2. Machinic heterogenesis 3. Schizoanalytic metamodelisation 4. Schizo chaosmosis 5. Machinic orality and virtual ecology 6. The new aesthetic paradigm 7. The ecosophic object

    Book Blogging: 'Chaosmosis' Horace Jeffery Hodges 2005

  • Nor can either abiogenesis or heterogenesis be excluded

    SPONTANEOUS GENERATION ARAM VARTANIAN 1968

  • On this aspect of the question, Pasteur's disproof of heterogenesis was not altogether decisive and was, in part, to be counterbalanced on a more theoretical plane by the success of Darwinism after 1859.

    SPONTANEOUS GENERATION ARAM VARTANIAN 1968

  • But while the great majority of scientists, until around 1750, were cautious enough — in both science and religion — to disavow heterogenesis, the question as to how the

    SPONTANEOUS GENERATION ARAM VARTANIAN 1968

  • Its two main ver - sions will be further defined as abiogenesis, or the production of living things from nonorganic matter, and heterogenesis, or the rise of living things from organic matter, both animate and inanimate, without genetic resemblance or continuity.

    SPONTANEOUS GENERATION ARAM VARTANIAN 1968

  • Instead, he con - tinued to accept a limited type of heterogenesis pertaining to the presumed production of gall-insects from living plant tissues and of parasitic worms by the host organism.

    SPONTANEOUS GENERATION ARAM VARTANIAN 1968

  • But if Pasteur and his followers disposed finally of heterogenesis, this did not really check the career in the modern age of another version of spontaneous generation — that connected with the problem of archebiosis, or the first origins of life on our planet.

    SPONTANEOUS GENERATION ARAM VARTANIAN 1968

  • It is noteworthy that until that late period those treat - ing the subject did not, as a rule, trouble to make any theoretical distinction between abiogenesis and heterogenesis, it being apparently just as easy for them to imagine the sudden emergence of life from such inorganic substances as mud or water, as its nonrepro - ductive derivation from organic matter, whether living or dead.

    SPONTANEOUS GENERATION ARAM VARTANIAN 1968

  • The banishing of heterogenesis from microbiology and the resultant recognition that micro-organisms, like all the more visible forms of life, are reproduced only by their own kind, made possible the establishment of bacteri - ology as a precise science and its revolutionary appli - cations in immunology and in the treatment of infec - tious diseases.

    SPONTANEOUS GENERATION ARAM VARTANIAN 1968

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