Page 75 - The Importance of Following the Good Word

cloth, and it was believed that mice would originate from it
after a while.
Similarly, maggots developing in rotting meat was as-
sumed to be evidence of spontaneous generation. However,
it was later understood 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 bacteria could come into existence from non-living mat-
ter 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." 1
For a long time, advocates of the theory of evolution re-
sisted these findings. However, as the development of sci-
ence 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 ori-
gin of life in the twentieth century was the renowned Russian
biologist Alexander Oparin. With various theses he ad-
vanced 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

The Deception of Evolution 73