Page 288 - The Origin of Birds and Flight

286 The Origin of Birds and Flight

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." 253
For a long time, advocates of the theory of evolution resisted these
findings. However, as the development of science unraveled the com-
plex 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. 254
Evolutionist followers of Oparin tried to carry out experiments to
solve this problem. The best known experiment was carried out by the
American chemist Stanley Miller in 1953. Combining the gases he al-
leged to have existed in the primordial Earth's atmosphere in an experi-
ment set-up, and adding energy to the mixture, Miller synthesized sev-
eral organic molecules (amino acids) present in the structure of proteins.
Barely a few years had passed before it was revealed that this exper-
iment, which was then presented as an important step in the name of ev-
olution, was invalid, for the atmosphere used in the experiment was
very different from the real Earth conditions. 255
After a long silence, Miller confessed that the atmosphere medium
he used was unrealistic. 256
All the evolutionists' efforts throughout the twentieth century to ex-
plain the origin of life ended in failure. The geochemist Jeffrey Bada,