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The Deception of Evolution
w e re carried there by flies in the form of larvae, invisible to the
naked eye.
Even when Darwin wrote The Origin of Speciesthe belief that
,
bacteria could come into existence from non-living matter was
widely accepted in the world of science.
H o w e v e r, 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 re-
cover from the mortal blow struck by this simple experiment." 1
For a long time, advocates of the theory of evolution re s i s t e d
these findings. However, as the development of science unraveled
the complex stru c t u re 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.
2
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. Combining the
gases he alleged to have existed in the primordial Earth's atmos-
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