Page 275 - Signs from the Qur'an

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." 1
For a long time, advocates of the theory of evolution re-

sisted 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.

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 biol-
ogist 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 primor-
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