Page 221 - Allah's Gentle Artistry

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For a long time, advocates of the theory of evolution resisted
these findings. However, as the development of science unrave-
led 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 coin-
cidence. 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 evo-
lution of organisms. 39
Evolutionist followers of Oparin tried to carry out experi-
ments 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 primordi-
al Earth's atmosphere in an experiment set-up, and adding
energy to the mixture, Miller synthesized several organic mole-
cules (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 in
the experiment was very different from the real Earth conditi-
ons. 40
After a long silence, Miller confessed that the atmosphere
medium he used was unrealistic. 41