Page 81 - Justice and Compassion in the Qur'an

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HARUN YAHYA (ADNAN OKTAR)

"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
organisms, 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 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 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." 51
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