Page 351 - General Knowledge from the Qur'an

The Evolution Misconception 349

Advocates of the theory of evolution resisted the findings of Pasteur
for a long time. 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
IN 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 1930's, he tried to
prove that the cell of a living being could originate by coincidence.
These studies, however, were doomed to failure, and Oparin had to
make the following confession: 'Unfortunately, however, the problem
of the origin of the cell is perhaps the most obscure point in the whole
study of the evolution of organisms.' 17
Evolutionist followers of Oparin tried to carry out experiments to
solve the problem of the origin of life. The best known of these experi-
ments was carried out by American chemist Stanley Miller in 1953.
Combining the gases he alleged to have existed in the primordial
earth's atmosphere in an experiment set-up, and adding energy to the
mixture, Miller synthesized several organic molecules (amino acids)
present in the structure of proteins.
Barely a few years had passed before it was revealed that this exper-
iment, which was then presented as an important step in the name of
evolution, was invalid, the atmosphere used in the experiment having
been very different from real earth conditions. 18
After a long silence, Miller confessed that the atmosphere medium
he used was unrealistic. 19
All the evolutionist efforts put forth throughout the twentieth cen-
tury to explain the origin of life ended with failure. The geochemist
Jeffrey Bada from San Diego Scripps Institute accepts this fact in an ar-
ticle published in Earth Magazine in 1998:
Today as we leave the twentieth century, we still face the biggest unsolved
problem that we had when we entered the twentieth century: How did life
originate on Earth? 20