Can you believe it, mice come from dirty underwear, or so said Dr. Jan Baptista von Helmont whose recipe for mice included a dirty shirt, and a few grains of wheat and in 21 days mice will appear. Spontaneous generation or the concept that living things can be generated from non-living things had been accepted as the scientific norm for centuries, a concept that had been promoted since the time of Aristotle in the 4th century BC.

In von Helmont’s time questioning spontaneous generation was tantamount to questioning science itself. No one would dare challenge the prevailing scientific thought of the day. We are seeing the same things when it comes to Darwinian Theory today. Only a courageous scientist could stand up against the prevailing scientific consensus.

Science tried to replicate the mice and underwear experiment with raw meat and maggots. The thought went like this; Scientists observed that when raw meat was left out, maggots would be found on the meat a week later. Scientist took this as proof of spontaneous generation. That is, until an Italian physician and scientist named Francesco Redi proved them wrong in 1668 by placing a sample of raw meat in a jar leaving the top open and a sample of raw meat in a jar and covered the top with cheesecloth, as a sort of control. The meat left out in the open produced maggots that were later understood to be the offspring of flies. Of course, the jar that was covered with the cheesecloth was maggot free! But still spontaneous generation persisted.

Believe it or not, it would not be until the 19th century that, this scientific fallacy was finally laid to rest. In 1859 Lois Pasture falsified the ‘pond scum’ evidence with a simple S-shaped flask experiment. He was able to produce clear meat broth, boil it to purify it and then split the sample. One half he exposed to air and thereby bacterial contaminants and the other half remained contamination free and therefore sterile. The broth that was exposed to air got contaminated and grew microorganisms; the sterile, air-free broth did not.

We clearly see that centuries of bad science can, and should, be challenged. Eventually good science will replace the bad science, but it can be a long and protracted battle to get science to accept information that is contrary to the accepted norm. Even though evolution says that life spontaneously arose from a cosmic soup billions of years ago, the scientific facts say it never happened. Today they don’t call it spontaneous generation, they call it abiogenesis, but rest assured, molecules never spontaneously come to life.