Page 137 - Consciousness in the Cell

HARUN YAHYA
dirty piece of cloth, and it
was believed that mice wo-
uld originate from it after a
while.
Similarly, maggots de-
veloping in rotting meat was
assumed to be evidence of
spontaneous generation. Ho-
wever, it was later understo-
od that worms did not
appear on meat spontane-
ously, but were carried there
by flies in the form of larvae,
invisible to the naked eye. Louis Pasteur
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 experi-
ments, 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." 1
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 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

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