Page 129 - The Miracle in the Spider

The Evolution Deceit 129

Similarly, worms developing in meat
was assumed to be evidence of
spontaneous generation. However, only
some time later was it understood that
worms did not appear on meat
spontaneously, but were carried there by
flies in the form of larvae, invisible to the
naked eye.
Even in the period when Darwin
wrote The Origin of Species, the belief that
bacteria could come into existence from With the experiments he carried out,
non-living matter was widely accepted Louis Pasteur invalidated the claim
that "inanimate matter can create life",
in the world of science.
which constituted the groundwork of
However, five years after Darwin's the theory of evolution.
book was published, the discovery of
Louis Pasteur disproved this belief, which constituted the groundwork of
evolution. Pasteur summarized the conclusion he reached after time-
consuming studies and experiments: "The claim that inanimate matter can
originate life is buried in history for good." 34
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
20th Century

The first evolutionist who took up the subject of the origin of life in
the 20th 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