(By the way, viruses do not figure into this scenario because they are not technically "alive" in the classic sense. To be fully alive means having the ability to take nourishment from the immediate environment, turn that nourishment into energy, expel waste, and reproduce indefinitely. Viruses need a living host to flourish, though they can and do reproduce themselves when ensconced in a suitable host. So it seems safe to assume hosts precede viruses in every case.)
Needless to say, the discovery of fossilized prokaryotes at 3.6 billion years ago left scientists reeling. However, because so many of their pet theories had been overturned in the past, they knew how to react without panic or stridency. They made a collective decision to just whistle in the dark and move on as if nothing had changed. And nothing did. No textbooks were rewritten to accommodate the new discovery. Teachers continued to teach the spontaneous animation theory as they had been doing for decades. The stromatolites were consigned to the eerie limbo where all OOPARTS (out-of-place artifacts) dwell, while scientists edgily anticipated the next bombshell.
They didn't have to wait long. In the late 1980's a biologist named Carl Woese discovered that not only did life appear on Earth in the form of prokaryotes at around 4.0 billion years ago, there was more than one kind! Woese found that what had always been considered a single creature was in fact two distinct types he named archaea and true bacteria. This unexpected, astounding discovery made one thing clear beyond any shadow of doubt: Life could not possibly have evolved on Earth. For it to appear as early as it did in the fossil record, and to consist of two distinct and relatively sophisticated types of bacteria, meant spontaneous animation flatly did not occur.
This discovery has been met with the same resounding silence as the stromatolite discovery. No textbooks have been rewritten to accommodate it. No teachers have changed what they are teaching. If you can find a high school biology teacher that religious fundamentalists have not yet terrorized into silence, go to their classroom and you will find them blithely teaching that spontaneous animation is how life came to be on Earth. Mention the words "stromatolite" or "prokaryote" and you will get frowns of confusion from teacher and students alike. For all intents and purposes this is unknown information, withheld from those who most need to know about it because it does not fit the currently accepted paradigm built around Charles Darwin�s besieged theory of gradualism.
One reason scientists resist disseminating the truth is that it would so profoundly change the financial landscape for many of them. Consider the millions and billions of tax dollars and foundation grants that are spent each year trying to answer one question: Does life exist beyond Earth? The reality of two types of prokaryotes appearing suddenly, virtually overnight, at around 4.0 billion years ago provides overwhelming testimony that the answer is "Yes!" Clearly life could not have spontaneously animated from inorganic chemicals in seas comprised of seething lava rather than relatively cool water. So billions of dollars of funding would vanish if scientists ever openly conceded that life must have come to Earth from somewhere else because it obviously could not have originated here.
A second reason scientists avoid disseminating this knowledge is that spontaneous animation is a fundamental tenet of their corollary theory of human evolution. As with life in general, scientists insist that humanity is a product of the same protracted series of gradual genetic mutations that they feel produced every living thing on Earth. And, again, all this has been done by natural processes within the confines of the planet, with no outside intervention of any kind, divine or extraterrestrial. So, if spontaneous animation goes out the window, then the dreaded specter of outside intervention comes slithering in to take its place, and that idea is so anathema to scientists they would rather deal with the myriad embarrassments caused by their blowed-up icon and his clearly bankrupt theory.
