Page 225 - A Historical Lie: The Stone Age

HARUN YAHYA

"Life Comes From Life"
In his book, Darwin never referred to the origin of life. The pri-
mitive understanding of science in his time rested on the assumption
that living beings had a very simple structure. Since medieval times,
spontaneous generation, which asserts that non-living materials ca-
me together to form living organisms, had been widely accepted. It
was commonly believed that insects came into being from food lefto-
vers, and mice from wheat. Interesting experiments were conducted
to prove this theory. Some wheat was placed on a dirty piece of cloth,
and it was believed that mice would originate from it after a while.
Similarly, maggots developing in rotting meat was assumed to
be evidence of spontaneous generation. However, it was later un-
derstood that worms did not appear on meat spontaneously, but we-
re 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 wi-
dely accepted in the world of science.
However, five years after the publication of Darwin's book, Lo-
uis 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." 83
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.

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