The theory of evolution was advanced by Charles Darwin in the middle of the 19th century. That period greatly differed from today in terms of its extremely poor level of science and technology. 19th century scientists had to work in simple laboratories with quite primitive equipment. With the devices then available, it was impossible for them to view even bacteria.
Furthermore, scientists were still under the influence of many superstitious beliefs upheld since the Middle Ages.
One of these superstitious beliefs was that life had a simple form. Going as far back as Aristotle, this belief maintained that life could self-originate by the coincidental assembly of inanimate matter in a moist milieu.
While developing his theory, Darwin relied on the belief that life basically had a simple structure. Other biologists who adopted and defended Darwin’s theory thought the same way. For instance, the greatest advocate of Darwinism in Germany, Ernst Haeckel supposed that the living cell, which could only be viewed as a dark spot under the microscopes of that time, had a very simple structure. In one of his articles, he referred to the cell as “a simple little lump of albuminous combination of carbon”.
The theory of evolution was based on assumptions such as these. The pioneers of evolutionary theory like Haeckel, Darwin and Huxley thought that life had a very simple form and that this simple form could originate by itself as a result of chance.
However, they were mistaken.
In the one and a half centuries that have passed since Darwin’s day, giant steps have been taken in science and technology. Scientists discovered the structure of the cell to which Haeckel referred as “a simple little lump of albuminous combination of carbon”. They saw with surprise that it is not simple at all as earlier supposed. It was revealed that the cell has a system so complex as to have been unimaginable in Darwin’s time.
A renowned molecular biologist, Michael Denton, makes the following analogy to describe what kind of a structure the cell has:
To grasp the reality of life as it has been revealed by molecular biology, we must magnify a cell a thousand million times until it is twenty kilometers in diameter and resembles a giant airship large enough to cover a great city like London or New York. What we would then see would be an object of unparalleled complexity and adaptive design. On the surface of the cell we would see millions of openings, like the port holes of a vast space ship, opening and closing to allow a continual stream of materials to flow in and out. If we were to enter one of these openings we would find ourselves in a world of supreme technology and bewildering complexity. (Michael Denton, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis. London: Burnett Books, 1986, p. 328)
Now, lets vitalize Professor Denton’s spaceship analogy and see the complexity in the cell closer...
