Page 129 - The Worst Slander: Idolatry

Harun Yahya (Adnan Oktar) 127

ed 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 mat-
ter 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 tri-
umphal lecture at the Sorbonne in 1864, Pasteur said:
"Never will the doctrine of spontaneous generation
recover from the mortal blow struck by this simple exper-
iment." 1
For a long time, advocates of the theory of evolution
resisted these findings. However, as the development of sci-
ence 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: