Page 380 - In The Name Of Allah, The All-Merciful And Most Merciful
P. 380
In the Name of Allah, The All-Merciful and Most Merciful
periments, that disproved spontaneous generation, a corner-
stone of Darwin's theory. In his triumphal lecture at the
Sorbonne in 1864, Pasteur said: "Never will the doctrine of spon-
taneous generation recover from the mortal blow struck by this
simple experiment." 1
For a long time, advocates of the theory of evolution resist-
ed these findings. However, as the development of science un-
raveled 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 organisms. 2
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 ener-
gy to the mixture, Miller synthesized several organic molecules
8
7
3 378