9781422277607

For a short video on the age of the Earth, scan here:

and elimination. It is the selected species that are alive today. His theory includes man as a close relation of the apes and monkeys, and indicates that we too evolved, by the same process of natural selection , over hundreds of generations, from ape-like ancestors. We are quite used to evolution today: most people accept it without question. But in Darwin’s own day, his revolutionary theories brought a storm of protest, for other beliefs were deeply rooted in the minds of many people. The idea that animals might have evolved, however, was not really new. Darwin’s own grandfather Erasmus, a well-known physician and philosopher of the eighteenth century, was writing and talking about evolution long before Charles was born, and Erasmus Darwin was by no means the first to do so. But the idea of evolution offended many people who held other beliefs. Many, for example, took the Bible as literal truth and believed that plants and animals were formed during the six days of Creation at the beginning of the world, and had not changed since. They believed too that man was created in God’s own image, and to say that he was descended from apes was worse than nonsense—it was blasphemy. Darwin’s theory was not only that plants and animals had evolved, although

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