Page 178 - The Miracle of the Honeybee

176 THE MIRACLE OF THE HONEYBEE

of spontaneous generation recover from the
mortal blow struck by this simple experi-
ment." 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 being coincidentally faced an even
greater impasse.
Alexander Oparin
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 liv-
ing 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. 155
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 alleged
to have existed in the primordial Earth's atmosphere in an experiment set-
up, and adding energy to the mixture, Miller synthesized several organic
molecules (amino acids) present in the structure of proteins.
Barely a few years had passed before it was revealed that this experi-
ment, which was then presented as an important step in the name of evo-
lution, was invalid, for the atmosphere used in the experiment was very
different from the real Earth conditions. 156
After a long silence, Miller confessed that the atmosphere medium he
used was unrealistic. 157
All the evolutionists' efforts throughout the twentieth century to ex-
plain the origin of life ended in failure. The geochemist Jeffrey Bada, from