Page 150 - Devotion Among Animals Revealing the Work of God

DEVOTION AMONG ANIMALS

Similarly, maggots developing in rotting meat was assumed 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 matter 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
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struck by this simple experiment."
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 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 1930s, he tried to prove that a liv-
ing cell could originate by coincidence.
These studies, however, were doomed to
failure, and Oparin had to make the fol-
lowing confession:
Unfortunately, however, the problem of
the origin of the cell is perhaps the most

Alexander Oparin

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