[aruanan]

That must have been quite a school! It had first editions of the whole panoply of evolutionary writers who apparently devised the theory of evolution an entire century before Darwin and Wallace. It’s a shame you never attempted to read some of them - of course, they were do doubt over your head...

Sorry, 1800's, not 18th century. Funny that you should take the most unlikely explanation of the error. Well, maybe not so funny, considering. From the same school I got a numbered edition of White's A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom.

[angryoldfatman]

You really don’t have anything to apologize for, aruanan.

Evolution as a paradigm for biological diversity predates Darwin by over 1,000 years. The Greek philosophers founded the theory, and one could argue that Voltaire (FAR from a fundamentalist Christian!) was a more articulate spokesman against it than Darwin was for it.

http://history.hanover.edu/texts/voltaire/volathe1.html

Natural selection was implied by a parable from Jesus himself, which makes acknowledgement of it over 1,800 years old when Darwin got ahold of it.

http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew%2013:18-23&version=KJV

Darwin was the first one to publish a book that linked the two together, making natural selection the mechanism by which evolution occurred.

Notice I said he was the first one to publish. Alfred Russel Wallace was working on his own version of the theory, which prompted Darwin to scramble.