Page 376 - Allah's Miracles in the Qur'an

Allah's Miracles in the Qur'an

evidence of spontaneous generation. Howe-
ver, it was later understood that worms did
not appear on meat spontaneously, but
were carried there by flies in the form of lar-
vae, invisible to the naked eye.
Even when Darwin wrote The Origin of
Species, the belief that bacteria could come
into existence from non-living matter was

widely accepted in the world of science.
However, five years after the publica-
tion of Darwin's book, Louis Pasteur
announced his results after long studies Louis Pasteur
and experiments, that disproved spontane-
ous generation, a cornerstone of Darwin's theory. In his triumphal lec-
ture at the Sorbonne in 1864, Pasteur said: "Never will the doctrine of
spontaneous generation recover from the mortal blow struck by this
simple experiment." 304
For a long time, advocates of the theory of evolution resisted these
findings. However, as the development of science unraveled the com-
plex 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 biolo-
gist Alexander Oparin. With various theses
he advanced in the 1930s, he tried to prove
that a living cell could originate by coinci-
dence. These studies, however, were doo-
med to failure, and Oparin had to make
the following confession:

Alexander Oparin

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