Page 164 - The Miracle of Human Creation

THE MIRACLE OF HUMAN CREATION

"Life Comes from Life"
In his book, Darwin never referred to the origin of life. The primitive
understanding of science in his time rested on the assumption that living
beings had a very simple structure. Since medieval times, spontaneous
generation, the theory asserting that non-living materials came together to
form living organisms, had been widely accepted. It was commonly be-
lieved that insects came into being from food leftovers, and mice from
wheat. Interesting experiments were conducted to 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, worms developing in meat was assumed to be evidence of
spontaneous generation. However, only some time later was it understood
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 in the period when Darwin wrote The Origin of Species, the be-
lief 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 experiments, which
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 ex-
periment." 54
Advocates of the theory of evolution
resisted the findings of Pasteur for a long
time. However, as the development of sci-
ence unraveled the complex structure of
the cell of a living being, the idea that life

With the experiments he carried out, Louis Pasteur in-
validated the claim that "inanimate
matter can create life", which constituted the ground-
work of the theory of evolution.

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