32  Vivum ex vivo
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Vivum ex vivo – Life comes only [sic] from life. This statement formulated by Louis Pasteur still complies fully even today with all data obtained experimentally from inanimate (prebiotic) nature. At Darwin's time, it was still believed that life could develop spontaneously in wastes or rotting garbage. This development was called “abiogenesis”. Louis Pasteur was the first to prove that bacteria could not originate on their own.


On April 1, 1864 Louis Pasteur proved in the presence of a large convention of scientists at the Sorbonne in Paris with experiments that abiogenesis does not function. Pasteur, who rejected Darwins’ theory of the origin of the species concluded that life can evolve only from life. Nevertheless, today many scientists still believe that abiogenesis several billion years ago on the primordial earth could possibly have resulted in so-called “simple” forms of life (1).

It is helpfull to remember that even the simplest protozoa are comparable with a personal computer in terms of their complexity. Hundreds of mechanisms and hundred thousands of correct linksare required for a cell to live. Failure of even one single mechanism (or its absence in a fully functional form from the beginning) results in death of the cell or it not being capable to life from the very beginning.

The Nobel Prize winner Francis Crick saw the obvious impossibility of life evolving by chance. As an atheist and evolutionist, however, he did not want to accept a creator as the originator of life and therefore espoused the theory that life on earth originated from extraterrestrial sources. However, this does not solve the problem, it simply shifts it into space.

The renowned evolutionist and Senior Writer of Scientific American, John Horgan, wrote the following: "If I were a creationist, I would cease attacking the theory of evolution — which is so well supported by the fossil record — and focus instead on the origin of life. This is by far the weakest strut of the chassis of modern biology. The origin of life is a science writer's dream. It abounds with exotic scientists and exotic theories, which are never entirely abandoned or accepted, but merely go in and out of fashion."(2).

At a presentation in CERN near Geneva (17th Nov. 1965) the biochemist Ernest Kahane formulated as follows: "It is absurd and absolutely nonsense to believe that a living cell developed all by itself, nevertheless, I do believe it, because I cannot imagine any alternative.


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References:

(1) Bruno Vollmert, Das Molekül und das Leben, Rowohlt, 1985, Der Urey-Miller-Versuch: Ursuppen, P. 39–45.
(2) John Horgan, The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age, Little, Brown & Co, London, 1997, P. 138.
 
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