Page 246 - The Miracle of Migration in Animals

THE MIRACLE OF MIGRATION IN ANIMALS

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 re-
cover from the mortal blow struck by this simple experiment.” 75
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 organ-
isms. 76

Evolutionist followers of Oparin tried to carry out experiments
to solve this problem. The best known experiment was carried out by

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