A quote I found, while killing the time it takes to get from there to here:

"We should not imagine … that the struggle over spontaneous generation was a story of the triumph of materialism and empiricism over superstition and a priori natural philosophy. On the contrary, nineteenth-century materialists took sides against the biogenetic law, the rule of 'all life from life.' For if there were an unbridgeable gap between the nonliving and living, how could we explain the primal origin of life except by the infusion of a vital spirit into clay by a Promethean God? … Nothing could be more antimaterialist than the claim for the uniqueness of life"
Richard Lewontin, It Ain't Necessarily So: The Dream of the Human Genome and Other Illusions (New York Review, 2001), pp.112-3, original emphasis

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