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                                 The Evolution Misconception

              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 experiment." 43
                  Advocates of the theory of evolution resisted the findings
              of Pasteur for a long time. 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 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 1930’s, he tried to prove that the cell of a
              living being 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." 44
                  Evolutionist followers of Oparin tried to carry out
              experiments to solve the problem of the origin of life. The
              best known of these experiments was carried out by
              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, Miller synthesized several organic molecules
              (amino acids) present in the structure of proteins.
                  Barely a few years had passed before it was revealed that
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