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The Deception Of Evolution


         be evidence of spontaneous generation. However, it was later un-
         derstood 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
         recover from the mortal blow struck by this simple experiment." 1
           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 im-
         passe.



           INCONCLUSIVE EFFORTS IN 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 evolu-
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