Page 104 - Timelessness and the Reality of Fate

102 TIMELESSNESS AND THE REALITY OF FATE

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 struck
by this simple experiment." 63
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. 64
Evolutionist followers of Oparin tried to
carry out experiments to solve this problem. The
best known experiment was carried out by the
American chemist Stanley Miller in 1953. Com-
bining the gases he alleged to have existed in the
primordial Earth's atmosphere in an experiment
set-up, and adding energy to the mixture, Miller
synthesized several organic molecules (amino
acids) present in the structure of proteins.
Barely a few years had passed before it was
revealed that this experiment, which was then
presented as an important step in the name of
evolution, was invalid, for the atmosphere used

Russian biologist in the experiment was very different from the
Alexander Oparin 65
real Earth conditions.