Before Darwin

This is not just the story of a man. It's also the story of an idea that changed the world.

Charles Darwin is as unlikely a hero as you'll ever meet. He spent almost half his life sick in bed — or at least pretending to be sick. He was a bad student and barely made it through school. He authored several famous books but found writing a painful chore and struggled to express himself with words. He had terrible stage fright and couldn't defend his work in public. Though he sailed around the world, he would immediately get seasick whenever he stepped onto a boat. Despite being considered one of the greatest thinkers who ever lived, he was unable to control his own thoughts or emotions: he drove himself to distraction obsessing over unimportant details, and was often in a foul mood. He was filled with fear — of disease, of dying, and, worst of all, of rejection.

What a strange man! Why is he so famous? Underneath all these personality quirks was a reluctant genius. Although he didn't realize it, his whole life was spent creating and polishing one of the most important ideas in history. Nowadays, we use a single word to sum up this earth-shattering concept: evolution. But amazingly, Darwin himself never used this term to describe his theory. He preferred the more accurate (though harder to remember) phrase transmutation through natural selection. Yet even this term (which will be defined later) fails to convey the universe of ideas hidden within it.

Darwin was trying to explain where all the animals and plants in the world had come from. But in so doing he accidentally revealed one of the underlying principles of the universe. Evolution, it turned out, was not just about animals; it happens all around us, every day. We've slowly come to realize that almost everything evolves: languages, galaxies, fashions, ecosystems, ideas, relationships, diseases, cultures, and much more. Even the theory of evolution has itself evolved! Yet Darwin could never have predicted how far-reaching his ideas would someday turn out to be. He was only trying to figure out why the birds he saw on an obscure group of islands had different-sized beaks.

Evolution Before Darwin

Charles Darwin was not the first person to discover the concept of evolution. It had been around for centuries. He did not even invent the principle of natural selection. Darwin's unique achievement was to be the first person who brought these two ideas together into a single theory and to present overwhelming evidence of its truth.

Before Darwin, the vast majority of people in the world never gave a thought to the origin of animal species. They assumed that animals had looked and acted the same way forever. A cat was a cat, a pig was a pig. It was common sense. After all, no one had ever seen one kind of animal changing into another. Besides, the Bible says that God created all the animals long ago, and most people believed the Bible is always right. But as far back as ancient Greece, deep-thinking philosophers had speculated that evolution — or the changing of one species into another — must occur. What no one before Darwin had ever figured out was how it occurred.

Around 450 B.C. a Greek philosopher named Empedocles wrote that animals of every type had evolved from plants, but that most of them never survived. If they had features that did not enable them to eat and reproduce, then they would naturally die out. That is why, he reasoned, we only see well-adapted animals; the ill-adapted animals all went extinct. Amazingly, this idea from ancient times was very close to the concept of natural selection that Darwin developed 2,300 years later. Unfortunately, few people ever learned of Empedocles' ideas.

Aristotle, the famous Greek philosopher from the fourth century B.C., believed that certain types of animals were more advanced than others. He was the first person to create a taxonomy, or classification of life forms. He taught that all of life could be organized into a "Ladder of Creation." Bugs and snakes were the lowest because they crawled on the ground. Humankind was the highest because of its powerful minds. This way of looking at the world was very influential, and in Darwin's era most people agreed with Aristotle that human beings were "more advanced" or better than the "lower animals."

Many other ancient philosophers, such as Democritus and Anaximander, also promoted evolutionary ideas in their writings. They believed the world and everything in it had slowly evolved from nothingness and was constantly changing.

This period of intellectual freedom was not to last. During the Dark Ages and Middle Ages in Europe (about 400–1400 A.D.), the Catholic Church reigned supreme, and belief in the literal truth of the Bible was enforced by law. Evolutionary thinking disappeared entirely. The ancient philosophers were forgotten. The common belief was that God had created all animals on the fifth and sixth days of Creation, as described in the Book of Genesis. After that, God's job was done, and nothing new has ever come into the world. Therefore, all types of animals have existed since the beginning of time. Any other belief was considered heresy, a crime punishable by death.

The Rise of Science

During the Renaissance and the Age of Enlightenment (15th–18th centuries), people become more open-minded and the Catholic Church gradually became less influential. Scientific discoveries — such as the fact that the Earth revolved around the sun — showed that the Bible isn't always literally true. So, at this time, people began to regard the Bible mostly as a moral guide instead of a source of historical or scientific information. The change in the intellectual climate was slow and gradual, however. In England, the Anglican Church was still very conservative.

Many scientists tried to present their discoveries in a way that wouldn't offend the church. The concept of "Special Creation" was one attempt to merge new discoveries with church doctrine. Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, more and more animals, plants, and fossils were being discovered by explorers all over the world. People began to wonder: Did God really create these thousands of species all across the globe all at the same time? What about the fossil record? New animals appear in certain layers, and old ones disappear. Where did they come from if God didn't make them on the fifth and sixth days of Creation?

The answer was a compromise called Special Creation. Each new species was indeed created by God, but not necessarily at the beginning of time. Every now and then, according to this approach, God created new animals and plants in acts of "Special Creation" that took place after the incidents described in the Book of Genesis. This would explain the origins of species that seem to have appeared fairly recently. But once...