Page 77 - Unawareness: A Sly Threat

Harun Yahya 75

Life Comes From Life
In his book, Darwin never referred to the origin of life. The
primitive understanding of science in his time rested on the
assumption that living beings had a very simple structure.
Since medieval times, spontaneous generation, which asserts
that non-living materials came together to form living organ-
isms, had been widely accepted. It was commonly believed
that insects came into being from food leftovers, and mice
from wheat. Interesting experiments were conducted to prove
this theory. Some wheat was placed on a dirty piece of cloth,
and it was believed that mice would originate from it after a
while.
Similarly, maggots developing in rotting meat was
assumed to be evidence of spontaneous generation.
However, it was later understood that worms did not appear
on meat spontaneously, but were carried there by flies in the
form of larvae, invisible to the naked eye.
Even when Darwin wrote The Origin of Species, the belief
that bacteria could come into existence from non-living mat-
ter 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 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

Adnan Oktar