Page 92 - The Miracle in the Mosquito

THE MIRACLE IN THE MOSQUITO

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 exper-
iments, 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 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. 2

Evolutionist followers of Oparin tried to carry out experi-
ments to solve this problem. The best known experiment was car-
ried 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

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