Page 12 - Consciousness in the Cell

INTRODUCTION

The theory of evolution was put forward by the naturalist
Charles Darwin in the middle of the 19th century, when the level of
science and technology was rather primitive, compared with
today's. Nineteenth-century scientists worked in relatively simple
laboratories. With the very unsophisticated equipment available to
them, scientists couldn't even see bacteria. Moreover, they were
still under the influence of many false beliefs left over from the
Middle Ages.
One of these misconceptions was that living organisms had a
fundamentally simple structure—a belief that can be traced back to
the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, who wrote that life could
come about spontaneously and coincidentally, as a result of inor-
ganic matter assembling itself in a moist environment.
In developing his theory, Darwin drew on the assumption that
living things had only a simple structure. Other biologists who
later adopted and defended Darwin's theory shared this same be-
lief. For example, from the view of cells that 19th century micro-
scopes provided, Ernst Haeckel, Darwin's greatest supporter in
Germany, believed that a cell was a "simple little lump of albu-
minous combination of carbon," not much different from a piece of
microscopic jello. (John Farley, The Spontaneous Generation Contro-
versy from Descartes to Oparin, 2nd ed., Baltimore: The Johns Hop-
kins University Press, 1979, p. 73)
The theory of evolution was based upon this and other similar
presumptions. Authors of the theory like Haeckel, Darwin, and
Huxley believed that because life was made up of very simple
structures, it could come about by itself, randomly. But they were
wrong, of course.

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