Page 43 - Once Upon a Time There Was Darwinism

Harun Yahya
(Adnan Oktar)

The boundary between animate and inani-
mate things was unclear not only in ancient Egypt. Many
early pagan societies believed that this boundary could be
easily crossed. In Hindu mythology, the world came into being

out of a huge, round blob of matter called prakriti. From this mater-
ial, all animate and inanimate things evolved and will return to it
again. Anaximander, the ancient Greek philosopher Thales' pupil,
wrote in his book On Nature that animals came to be from some
mud steaming in the heat of the Sun.
The basis of all these superstitions was the belief that living
things were simple structures. This belief was long maintained in
Europe, where modern science began to develop in the 16th cen-
tury. But the idea that the structure of life was simple held sway for

at least another three hundred years, because scientists did not
have the means to observe the minute details of living things, espe-
cially microscopic cells and tiny molecules.
A few superficial observations and experiments convinced
scientists that life was simple. For example, the Belgian chemist Jan
Baptista van Helmont (1577-1644), spread some wheat on a soiled
shirt and, after a while, observed mice scurrying around the shirt.
He concluded that the mice were produced from the combination
of the wheat and the shirt. The German scientist Athanasius
Kircher (1601-1680) did a similar experiment. He poured some
honey over some dead flies and later saw other flies were zooming

around the honey; he assumed that combining honey with dead
flies produced living ones.

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