Page 11 - RD (English) - Sample

IntroductIon 3

life was too intricate to have been caused by nature alone. Almost a
hundred years before Darwin, when the Swedish botanist Carolus
Linnaeus (1707–1778) revolutionized biology by inventing the system
of taxonomy we still use today, he created a nested hierarchy showing
all living forms as related, classifying them by species, genus, family
(order), class, and kingdom. This didn’t mean Linnaeus read natural
evolution into his biological hierarchy; like almost any other scientist
of his day, he saw the hierarchy as the materialization of a divine plan.
This view changed when Darwin, in 1859, published On the Origin
of Species. Within Darwin’s lifetime – perhaps only two decades after
Origin was published – almost the only way a scientist could think and
still be respected was as a natural evolutionist. This does not mean
Darwin’s ideas went uncontested. Many leading scientists of his day
found evolution unconvincing. But the tide in favor of the theory was
so strong that even Harvard professor Louis Agassiz, one of the nine-
teenth century’s most stalwart natural scientists, fell practically into
obscurity because of his opposition to Darwinian thought.
In the words of biologist Francisco Ayala, former president of the
American Association for the Advancement of Science:

Darwin’s greatest accomplishment was to show that the com-
plex order and function in living creatures can be explained as a
result of a natural process – natural selection – without having
to refer to a Creator or some other external factor. 2

British zoologist Richard Dawkins put the matter more bluntly:
“Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.” 3
Of course, whether creating atheists was Darwin’s actual intent is
uncertain, even unlikely. At least in Origin, he only argued that the
numerous species of living organisms need not have been created sep-
arately but could have emerged naturally, on their own, over eons, from
one or a few simple and original life forms (“I view all beings not as spe-
cial creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings which
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lived long before the first bed of the Silurian system was deposited.” ).