The Illustrated Story of Evolution

Marshal J. Gauvin

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Excerpt: The Greek philosophers from Thales to Aristotle, more than two thousand years ago, entertained the notion that all thing...

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Excerpt: The Greek philosophers from Thales to Aristotle, more than two thousand years ago, entertained the notion that all things have been developed from primitive beginnings. This view was shared in the fourth century of the Christian era by St. Augustine, probably the greatest of the church ?Fathers.? Then came the Dark Age,?an intellectual night of a thousand years?an era when reason and science were buried in the grave of superstition,?and at its close, the Revival of Learning, the dawn of the modern period. In that golden Renaissance of rational thought and scientific speculation, philosophical thinkers?Bruno, Campanella and others?influenced by the theories of the Greeks and by the astronomical discoveries of Kepler, Copernicus and Galileo, sought to explain the universe as an unfoldment from a simple, early condition of matter. But such speculation was denounced as dangerous, and Bruno died a martyr in the flames. Still the idea that there has been an evolution in nature persisted and grew, and the writings of Spinoza in Holland, of Locke in England, of Kant in Germany, of Lamarck in France,?to mention but a few philosophers?encouraged men to think that the secret of existence lay in the fact of growth. Then came the greatest of books on the development of living things. In 1859, Darwin gave the world his ?Origin of Species,? a work which laid the foundation of the science of evolution. Earlier thinkers had groped and guessed with little knowledge of Nature?s laws. But Darwin had discovered the laws of organic life, and, with an amazing array of evidential facts patiently observed and gathered in a score of years, he was able to support his view that species have been evolved ?by means of natural selection? through ?the preservation or favored races in the struggle of life.? In the interest of the six-days creation legend, a storm of theological wrath assailed the great man?s head. Knowing that truth was on his side, the saint of science paid no heed to slander and patiently worked on. And in twenty-three years he wrought a greater, a more far-reaching revolution in the thoughts of intelligent mankind than was ever accomplished by any other of the sons of men; and when he died, England was glad to honor his dust with burial in her sacred Westminster Abbey.