Page 200 - Global Freemasonry

GLOBAL FREEMASONRY

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 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 experiments, that dis-
proved spontaneous generation, a cornerstone of Darwin's theory. In his
triumphal lecture at the Sorbonne in 1864, Pasteur said: "Never will the doc-
trine of spontaneous generation recover from the mortal blow struck by
this simple experiment." 142
For a long time, advocates of the theory of evolution resisted these find-
ings. However, as the development of science unraveled the complex struc-
ture of the cell of a living being, the idea that life could come into being coin-

cidentally faced an even greater impasse.

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 Alexander 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 following confes-
sion:
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. 143
Evolutionist followers of Oparin tried to carry out
experiments to solve this problem. The best known
experiment was carried out by the 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 mix-
Russian biologist
Alexander Oparin

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