Page 218 - Beautiful Rohingyas

216 Beautiful Rohingyas

"Life Comes From Life"

In his book, Darwin never referred to the origin of life. The
primitive understanding of science in his time rested on the
assumption that living beings had a very simple structure. Since
medieval times, spontaneous generation, which asserts that non-
living materials came together to form living organisms, had been
widely accepted. It was commonly believed that insects came into

being from food leftovers, and mice from wheat. Interesting exper-
iments were conducted 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
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 exper-
iments, 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."
(Sidney Fox, Klaus Dose, Molecular Evolution and The Origin of Life,
W. H. Freeman and Company, San Francisco, 1972, p. 4.)

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