Page 185 - Islam and Buddhism

The Deception of Evolution

to prove this theory. Some wheat was placed on a dirty piece of cloth,

and it was believed that mice would originate from it after a while.
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
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 experi-
ments, 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." 21
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.

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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 the-
The French biologist Louis Pasteur
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