Page 188 - The Miracles of Smell and Taste

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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 experiments 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 ev-
idence 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 bacte-
ria could come into existence from non-living matter was widely accept-

ed 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 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." 154
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 be-
ing coincidentally faced an even greater impasse.

The Miracles of Smell and
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