system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Before Darwin, were there any other secular theories on the origin of life?
gpt
Evolution doesn't explain the origin of life, it explains how life changes and adapts to its environment.

Anyway, for a long time people believed that life just randomly appeared from non-living things, this idea was called spontaneous generation. Things like maggots appearing in rotting meat were taken as proof that life can just randomly come from other things. There was also a hoax that involved gluing a seed to a rock, which people took as very strong evidence that spontaneous generation was real, until somebody reveled the hoax.