Page 268 - Communism in Ambush

COMMUNISM IN AMBUSH
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w which disproved spontaneous generation, a
cornerstone of Darwin’s theory. In his tri-
umphal lecture at the Sorbonne in 1864,
Pasteur said: “Never will the doctrine of
spontaneous generation recover from the
mortal blow struck by this simple experi-
ment.” (Sidney Fox, Klaus Dose, Molecular
Evolution and The Origin of Life, W. H.
Freeman and Company, San Francisco,
1972, p. 4.)
For a long time, advocates of the theory
of evolution resisted Pasteur’s findings. As accepted also by the
latest evolutionist theo-
However, as the development of science rists, the origin of life is
unraveled the complex structure of the still a great stumbling
block for the theory of
cell of a living being, the idea that life could
evolution.
come into being coincidentally faced an even
greater impasse.

FUTILE EFFORTS IN 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 chance. These stud-
ies, 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.
(Alexander I. Oparin, Origin of Life, Dover Publications, New York, 1936,
1953 and 2003 (reprint), p. 196)
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 those gases
he alleged to have existed in the primordial Earth’s atmosphere in an