Page 76 - Why Do You Deceive Yourself ?

74 WHY DO YOU DECEIVE YOURSELF?

Similarly, maggots developing in rotting meat was assumed to be
evidence of spontaneous generation. However, it was later under-
stood that worms did not appear on meat spontaneously, but were car-
ried 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 ac-
cepted 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." 1
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
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. 2

Evolutionist followers of Oparin tried to carry out experiments to