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Charles Darwin: On Natural Selection
 In the sixteenth century, James Ussher and John Lightfoot, working independently, dated the creation of the world to October 23, 4004 B.C. Lightfoot pinpointed it to 9:00 AM. Apparently it was a Sunday.
Objects of ridicule since, these men were neither cranks nor fools. Ussher, archbishop of Armagh and vice-chancellor of Trinity College, Dublin, used the best information available then—ancient Egyptian and Hebrew texts and the "who begat whom" passages in Genesis—to arrive at the date. His books were sufficiently impressive to form the nucleus of Trinity's prestigious library. Lightfoot was a cleric, scholar, and much-admired Cambridge professor. The calculations of these distinguished gentlemen were taken as gospel for a very long time.
Three hundred years later, an abstract of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection was read at the Linnean Society along with a paper by Alfred Russel Wallace on a similar theme. Darwin wasn't there, and those who were seem not to have appreciated the immense significance of what they heard.
Darwin postulated life on earth as a continuous process and suggested a mechanism—natural selection—through which changes occurred, a way that species could evolve over time. It flew in the face of the belief that all creatures were created as separate entities, their essence unchanged and unchangeable. He did not deal with humans in Origin of Species; that was to come later with The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex. Still, it was but a short step from evolution in other species to the heretical idea that humankind was no unique creation forged in an instant by the Divine, that instead we had evolved from apes.
Darwin showed that the history or evolution of humankind could be studied scientifically, an astonishing concept at the time. The advances—scientific, philosophical, and medical—resulting from this absurdly simple notion would be enormous. Perhaps what Darwin really did, though, was expand the age of the earth from six thousand years to tens of thousands, then millions of years.
He wasn't the first to postulate a world much older than the conventional view, but he captured the public's imagination in a way others didn't. (No slouch at scientific observation, Darwin also displayed a talent for the catchy phrase. His "survival of the fittest" is burned into our psyches, used for purposes both good and evil, and currently beloved by bond traders everywhere.) He saw what others of his generation could not or would not see. He made possible the proverbial paradigm shift. The nineteenth century was a hotbed of science. The curious scoured the world for new discoveries, where possible bringing them back to their clubs and societies for study. With one stroke, skeletons, cave drawings, pottery shards, fossils, and chipped stones, no longer constrained by Ussher and Lightfoot's timeframe, suddenly made sense. Our comprehension of our planet and its species exploded.
Once stated, great ideas such as Darwin's can never be put back in the box. Evolution was heatedly opposed by the likes of Bishop Wilberforce and Benjamin Disraeli (who, when asked which side of the ape or angel debate he supported, opted to be "on the side of the angels," thus proving he too could coin an enduring phrase), and is still considered a mere theory in certain quarters today. It is besmirched by unpleasant, indeed racist, sentiments, such as Frances Galton's eugenics, incorrectly derived from it. Nevertheless, the idea prevails. Charles Darwin's great idea changed the course of history.
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 Lyn Hamilton is author of The Xibalba Murders, nominated by the Crime Writers of Canada Association for the Arthur Ellis Award: Best First Novel, and The Maltese Goddess, her second archaeological mystery featuring antiques dealer Lara McClintoch.
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