Quote taken from this BBC website, "
BBC - Earth - The secret of how life on Earth began":
"Every single person who died before Darwin published Origin of Species in 1859 was ignorant of humanity's origins, because they knew nothing of evolution."
Thank God for those who were born before 1859! At least some of them knew this, which is far better:
So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. (Genesis 1:27 KJV)
The following was also quoted from the same article:
QUOTE
Darwin knew that it was a profound question, but - perhaps wary of starting yet another fight with the Church - he only seems to have discussed the issue in a letter written in 1871. His excitable language reveals that he knew the deep significance of the question:
"But if (& oh what a big if) we could conceive in some warm little pond with all sorts of ammonia & phosphoric salts, - light, heat, electricity &c present, that a protein compound was chemically formed, ready to undergo still more complex changes..."
In other words, what if there was once a small body of water, filled with simple organic compounds and bathed in sunlight. Some of those compounds might combine to form a life-like substance such as a protein, which could then start evolving and becoming more complex.
It was a sketchy idea. But it would become the basis of the first hypothesis for how life began.
This idea emerged from an unexpected place. You might think that this daring piece of free thinking would have been developed in a democratic country with a tradition of free speech: perhaps the United States.
But in fact the first hypothesis for the origin of life was invented in a savagely totalitarian country, where free thinking was stamped out: the USSR.
In Stalin's Russia, everything was under the control of the state. That included people's ideas, even on subjects - like biology - that seem unrelated to Communist politics.
Most famously, Stalin effectively banned scientists from studying conventional genetics. Instead he imposed the ideas of a farm worker named Trofim Lysenko, which he thought were more in line with Communist ideology. Scientists working on genetics were forced to publicly support Lysenko's ideas, or risk ending up in a labour camp.
It was in this repressive environment that
Alexander Oparin carried out his research into biochemistry. He was able to keep working because he was a loyal Communist: he supported Lysenko's ideas and even received the Order of Lenin, the highest decoration that could be bestowed on someone living in the USSR.
In 1924, Oparin published his book The Origin of Life. In it he set out a vision for the birth of life that was startlingly similar to Darwin's warm little pond.
Oparin imagined what Earth was like when it was newly formed. The surface was searingly hot, as rocks from space plunged down onto it and impacted. It was a mess of semi-molten rocks, containing a huge range of chemicals – including many based on carbon.
Eventually the Earth cooled enough for water vapour to condense into liquid water, and the first rain fell. Before long Earth had oceans, which were hot and rich in carbon-based chemicals. Now two things could happen.
First, the various chemicals could react with each other to form lots of new compounds, some of which would be more complex. Oparin supposed that the molecules central to life, like sugars and amino acids, could all have formed in Earth's waters.
Second, some of the chemicals began to form microscopic structures. Many organic chemicals do not dissolve in water: for example, oil forms a layer on top of water. But when some of these chemicals contact water they form spherical globules called "coacervates", which can be up to 0.01cm (0.004 inches) across.
If you watch coacervates under a microscope, they behave unnervingly like living cells. They grow and change shape, and sometimes divide into two. They can also take in chemicals from the surrounding water, so life-like chemicals can become concentrated inside them. Oparin proposed that coacervates were the ancestors of modern cells.
Five years later in 1929, the English biologist
J. B. S. Haldane independently proposed some very similar ideas in a short article published in the Rationalist Annual.
Haldane had already made enormous contributions to evolutionary theory, helping to integrate Darwin's ideas with the emerging science of genetics.
He was also a larger-than-life character. On one occasion, he suffered a perforated eardrum thanks to some experiments with decompression chambers, but later wrote that: "the drum generally heals up; and if a hole remains in it, although one is somewhat deaf, one can blow tobacco smoke out of the ear in question, which is a social accomplishment."
Just like Oparin, Haldane outlined how organic chemicals could build up in water, "[until] the primitive oceans reached the consistency of hot dilute soup". This set the stage for "the first living or half-living things" to form, and for each one to become enclosed in "an oily film".
It is telling that of all the biologists in the world, it was Oparin and Haldane who proposed this. The idea that living organisms formed by purely chemical means, without a god or even a "life force", was radical. Like Darwin's theory of evolution before it, it flew in the face of Christianity.
That suited the USSR just fine. The Soviet regime was officially atheist, and its leaders were eager to support materialistic explanations for profound phenomena like life. Haldane was also an atheist, and a devoted communist to boot.
"At that time, to accept or not accept this idea depended essentially on personalities: whether they were religious or whether they supported left or communist ideas," says origin-of-life expert Armen Mulkidjanian of the University of Osnabrück in Germany. "In the Soviet Union they were accepted happily because they didn't need God. In the western world, if you look for people who were thinking in this direction, they all were lefties, communists and so on."
The idea that life formed in a primordial soup of organic chemicals became known as the
Oparin-
Haldane hypothesis.
It was neat and compelling, but there was one problem. There was no experimental evidence to back it up. This would not
arrive for almost a quarter of a century.
UNQUOTE
Evolution is faith, not science.
And evolution thrives in ignorance.
