Page 127 - The Struggle Against the Religion of Irreligion

Inconclusive Efforts in the 20th Century

The first evolutionist who took up the subject of the origin of life

in the 20th century was the renowned Russian biologist Alexander

Oparin. With various theses he advanced in the 1930s, he tried to

prove that the cell of a living being could originate by coincidence.

These studies, however, were doomed to failure, and Oparin had to

make the following confession:

Unfortunately, the origin of the cell remains a question which is

actually the darkest point of the entire evolution theory. 129

Oparin's evolutionist successors tried to carry out experiments to

solve the problem of the origin of life. The best known of these

experiments was done by American chemist Stanley Miller in 1953.

Combining the gases he alleged existed in the primordial earth's

atmosphere in an experiment setup, and adding energy to the

mixture, Miller synthesized organic molecules (amino acids) present in

the structure of proteins.

Barely a few years passed before it was revealed that this

experiment, which was then presented as an important step in the

name of evolution, was invalid – the atmosphere used in the

128 Cited in Molecular Evolution and the Origin of Life, p. 4.
129 Origin of Life, p. 196.

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