Charles Darwin upset a lot of people with his 1859 publication On the Origin of Species. Like Copernicus and Galileo before him, Darwin radically revised the place of humans in the natural world. Victorian society believed that a beneficent creator made Earth and all its species in one fell swoop, installing Homo sapiens near the top of the great chain of being. Darwin showed otherwise: new life forms, including humans, come into being as generations adapt to change over millions of years, and all species share one immense family tree. Darwin was widely attacked; as his biographer Janet Browne put it, his theory outraged competitors and turned “friends into deadly foes.”
Today we are confronted with a similar rejection of scientific evidence from within the discipline that helped to prove Darwin correct: geology. Considering a…
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