Page 192 - The Miracle in the Cell

THE MIRACLE IN THE CELL
stood that worms did not appear on meat spontaneously, but were
carried there by flies in the form of larvae, invisible to the naked eye.
Even when Darwin wrote The Origin of Species, the belief that bac-
teria could come into existence from non-living matter was widely
accepted in the world of science.
However, five years after the publication of Darwin's book, Louis
Pasteur announced his results after long studies and experiments, that
disproved spontaneous generation, a cornerstone of Darwin's theory.
In his triumphal lecture at the Sorbonne in 1864, Pasteur said: "Never
will the doctrine of spontaneous generation recover from the mortal
blow struck by this simple experiment." 17
For a long time, advocates of the theory of evolution resisted
these findings. However, as the development of science unraveled the
complex structure of the cell of a living being, the idea that life could
come into being coincidentally faced an even greater impasse.

Inconclusive Efforts of the
Twentieth Century
The first evolutionist who took
up the subject of the origin of
life in the twentieth century
was the renowned Russian
biologist Alexander Oparin.
With various theses he
advanced in the 1930s, he tried
to prove that a living cell could
originate by coincidence. These
studies, however, were doomed to
failure, and Oparin had to make the
Alexander Oparin's attempts to offer an following confession:
evolutionist explanation for the origin of
life ended in a great fiasco. Unfortunately, however, the prob-
lem of the origin of the cell is per-

190