Page 102 - The Golden Age
P. 102
THE GOLDEN AGE
ment 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 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 perhaps the most obscure
point in the whole study of the evolution of
organisms. 29
Evolutionist followers of Oparin
tried to carry out experiments to solve
this problem. The best known experiment
was carried out by the American chemist
Alexander Oparin
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, Miller synthesized several organic molecules (amino acids)
present in the structure of proteins.
Barely a few years had passed before it was revealed that this ex-
periment, which was then presented as an important step in the name
of evolution, was invalid, for the atmosphere used in the experiment
was very different from the real Earth conditions. 30
After a long silence, Miller confessed that the atmosphere medium
he used was unrealistic. 31
All the evolutionists' efforts throughout the twentieth century to
explain the origin of life ended in failure. The geochemist Jeffrey
Bada, from the San Diego Scripps Institute accepts this fact in an arti-
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