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106 DEEP THINKING

For a long time, advocates of the theory of evolution resisted these find-
ings. However, as the development of science unraveled the complex struc-
ture of the cell of a living being, the idea that life could come into being coin-
cidentally 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 coincidence. 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 evolution of organisms. 2
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 the gases he alleged to have exist-
ed in the primordial 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 experi-
ment, which was then presented as an important step in the name of evolu-
tion, was invalid, for the atmosphere used in the
experiment was very different from the real Earth
conditions. 3
After a long silence, Miller confessed that the
atmosphere medium he used was unrealistic. 4
All the evolutionists' efforts throughout the
twentieth century to explain the origin of life
ended in failure. The geochemist Jeffrey Bada, from
the San Diego Scripps Institute accepts this fact in
an article published in Earth magazine in 1998:
Today as we leave the twentieth century, we still face
the biggest unsolved problem that we had when we
entered the twentieth century: How did life originate on
Russian biologist Earth? 5
Alexander Oparin