Page 390 - America's Failure to Perceive the PKK

Similarly, maggots developing in rot-
ting meat was assumed to be evidence of
spontaneous generation. However, it was
later 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 when Darwin wrote The Origin of

Louise Pasteur 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 publication of Darwin's book,
Louis Pasteur announced his results after long studies and experi-
ments, that disproved spontaneous generation, a cornerstone of

Darwin's theory. In his triumphal lecture at the Sorbonne in 1864,
Pasteur said: "Never will the doctrine of spontaneous generation
recover from the mortal blow struck by this simple experiment."
(Sidney Fox, Klaus Dose, Molecular Evolution and The Origin of Life, W.
H. Freeman and Company, San Francisco, 1972, p. 4.)
For a long time, advocates of the theory of evolution resisted
these findings. 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.

I Inconclusive Efforts of the

Twentieth Century

The first evolutionist who took up the subject of the origin of life
in the twentieth century was the renowned Russian biologist Alexan-
der Oparin. With various theses he advanced in the 1930s, he tried to
prove that a living cell could originate by coincidence. These studies,
however, were doomed to failure, and Oparin had to make the fol-
lowing confession:

388 America's Failure to Perceive the PKK