Page 188 - Engineering in Nature

Engineering in Nature

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 bac-
teria could come into existence from non-living matter was widely ac-
cepted 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." 59
For a long time, advocates of the theory of evolution resisted these
findings. However, as the development of science unraveled the com-
plex 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 coin-
cidence. 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 evo-
lution of organisms. 60
Louis Pasteur
Evolutionist followers of Oparin tried to carry
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