Page 26 - The Dark Spell of Darwinism

The Dark Spell of Darwinism

gathered together in one
place—maggots in rotting
meat, for example— they
supposed they had arisen
through the process now
known as spontaneous gen-
eration. People believed
that geese were born from
trees, lambs from water-
melons, and that frogs
formed in rain clouds and
fell into ponds on the
ground. 5
In the 1600s, a
Early views on the origin of life included one that Belgian scientist by the
suggested sheep arose from a plant. Obviously,
this misconception isn't vastly different from mod- name of Jan Van Helmont
ern evolutionist ideas. decided to test the theory of
spontaneous generation. He
sprinkled wheat on a dirty shirt and waited for creatures to form on it.
Three weeks later, Van Helmont saw several mice feeding on the grains.
From his observations, he concluded that the combination of a dirty shirt
and wheat gives birth to mice.
A German scientist, Athanasius Kircher, came to the same conclu-
sion by another route. He poured honey over a number of dead flies and
shortly afterward, observed other flies swarming over the dead ones.
Whereupon Kircher believed that he had proven that dead flies and
honey produce living flies!
But experiments by the Italian scientist Francesco Redi and, after
him, the French scientist Louis Pasteur showed that mice did not arise
from dirty shirts, and that flies are not generated from a mixture of honey
and fly corpses. These living creatures did not arise from lifeless matter,
but arrived from somewhere else. For example, living flies are attracted

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