Page 80 - Slanders on Muslims in History

78 SLANDERS ON MUSLIMS IN HISTORY

studies and experiments, that disproved spontaneous
generation, a cornerstone of Darwin's theory. In his tri-
umphal lecture at the Sorbonne in 1864, PPasteur 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 Alexander Oparin. With various theses
he advanced in the 1930s, he tried to prove that a living
cell could originate by coincidence. These studies, how-
ever, 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 existed in the primordial Earth's atmosphere in
an experiment set-up, and adding energy to the mixture,