Page 90 - Paradise: The Believers' Real Home

88 PARADISE

Louis Pasteur announced his results after long studies and ex-
periments, that disproved spontaneous generation, a corner-

stone 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." 4
Advocates of the theory of evolution resisted these find-
ings 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 bi-
ologist 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. 5
Evolutionist followers of Oparin tried to carry out experi-
ments to solve this problem. The best known experiment was
carried out by the American chemist Stanley Miller in 1953.