Page 77 - Taking the Qur'an as a Guide

The Evolution Misconception

Louis Pasteur announced his results after long studies and ex-
periments, which disproved spontaneous generation, a corner-
stone of Darwin's theory. In his triumphal lecture at the
Sorbonne in 1864, Pasteur said, "Never will the doctrine of spon-
taneous generation recover from the mortal blow struck by this sim-
ple experiment." 2
Advocates of the theory of evolution resisted the findings of
Pasteur for a long time. However, as the development of sci-
ence 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 biolo-
gist 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 con-
fession: "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." 3
Evolutionist followers of Oparin tried to carry out experi-
ments 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

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