Page 78 - Unawareness: A Sly Threat

76 UNAWARENESS: A SLY THREAT

resisted these findings. However, as the development of sci-
ence 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 ori-
gin 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 fail-
ure, 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 pri-
mordial 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 experiment, which was then presented as an impor-
tant step in the name of evolution, was invalid, for the atmos-
phere used in the experiment was very different from the real
Earth conditions. 3