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of what Lyell had talked about with regard to fossils: ‘In the universal struggle for existence, the right of the strongest eventually prevails.’For Darwin this was why some species were successful and others became extinct, since it was inevitable that an environment would become saturated with organisms. Only those best able to commandeer the available food supply would survive and increase. Competition would force individuals into specialised ecological conditions where food was plentiful. Darwin’s conclusion was: ‘Under these circumstances favourable variations would tend to be preserved and unfavourable ones to be destroyed. The result of this would be the formation of new species.’

Moreover, Darwin saw that characteristics which aided reproduction would also enhance the chance of survival. These would show as either prowess in combat or heightened attractiveness by one or other sex of the species. A species would evolve through the blood-lines of those members with the best characteristics for survival. The rest would die off, or remain in the minority. Nature would select the fittest to survive.

Darwin sent a detailed outline of his thoughts to a friend, Asa Gray, in 1857. A year later, to his horror, he received a manuscript from the Far East. It had been sent by Alfred Russel Wallace, a naturalist working in the Malayan archipelago, who had arrived at the same conclusions about evolution as Darwin. After careful and polite exchanges and the reading of a joint paper at the Geological Society, it was agreed that Darwin had the prior claim and, thus urged, he published in 1859.

On the Origin of Species hit the world like a bombshell, because it was all too easy to apply to the human race what Darwin was saying about flora and fauna. Moreover, at the same time traces were being discovered of an early non-Adamite primitive human. In 1856 a German called Johann Karl Fuhlrott had found human remains of great antiquity in a cave near Düsseldorf; these had been named ‘Neanderthal’after the valley in which they had been located. In 1858 two Englishmen, Joseph Prestwich and Hugh Falconer, found more such remains in a cave near Brixham, in Devon.

The implications of these primitive remains were far-reaching. If there had been no Adam and no Eden, man was obviously subject to the same evolutionary rules as any other organism. He was no longer a special creation, made in God’s image. Moreover, if this were so, of what use was the religion which taught the lie? Predictably, Darwin came under immediate attack from the clergy. The Bible was either to be believed in its entirety, it was claimed, or not at all. In 1864 11,000 Anglican clergy signed the Oxford Declaration supporting the ‘all or nothing’view.

Well before that time, however, battle had been joined. At a great debate in Oxford in 1860, just after the publication of Origin, Bishop ‘Soapy Sam’Wilberforce attempted unsuccessfully to destroy Darwin’s argument. Against him in the debate spoke the naturalist Thomas Henry Huxley, a professional biologist and populariser of science. In the debate Huxley made the immortal remark: ‘I’d rather have an ape for an ancestor than a bishop.’

Darwin was also attacked in the press, as both journalists and public confused and oversimplified the issue. It appeared to them that science was simply against religion. Darwin’s naturalistic explanation of events removed the purposeful nature of the universe and with it, God’s design. It left man akin to the animals.

Darwin’s book stimulated a materialist movement. Karl Vogt, Professor of Geology at Geneva, travelled Europe lecturing on Origin, using the text to exacerbate the conflict between science and religion. The American John William Draper, who was anti-Catholic rather than anti-theology, used Darwin to support his views that if there had been no garden of Eden and no six-day Creation, the entire structure of belief was false. Darwin gave scientific backing to these crude free-thinkers.

Gradually, however, his views came to be accepted by the more intellectual theologians. The Bible