Page 108 - The School of Yusuf (as)

THE SCHOOL OF YUSUF

prove this theory. Some wheat was placed on a dirty piece of cloth,
and it was believed that mice would originate from it after a while.
Similarly, maggots developing in rotting meat was assumed to be
evidence of spontaneous generation. However, it was later under-
stood that worms did not appear on meat spontaneously, but were

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
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 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." 38
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 In 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

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