Page 77 - The Courage of the Faithful

The Deception of Evolution

that worms did not appear on meat spontaneously, but were carried
t h e re 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 ac-
cepted in the world of science.
H o w e v e r, five years after the publication of Darwin's book, Louis
Pasteur announced his results after long studies and experiments, that

d i s p roved 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
s t ruck by this simple experiment." 1
For a long time, advocates of the theory of evolution resisted these
findings. However, as the development of science unraveled the com-
plex stru c t u re 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 following confession:

,
U n f o r t u n a t e l yhowever, the problem of the origin of the cell is perhaps the
most obscure point in the whole study of the evolution of org a n i s m s . 2
Evolutionist followers of Oparin tried to carry out experiments

to solve this problem. The best known experiment was carried out by
the American chemist Stanley Miller in 1953. Combining the gases he

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