The discovery and study of fossils gave scientists the evidence that allowed new ways to ponder the Earth’s past, while simultaneously attempting to reconcile these theories with Biblical teachings and traditionalist ideas. Growing up with an interest in both nature and religion, Charles Darwin was curious to explain how species change over time, and why they appear so well adapted to their specific environments, while seemingly stemming from common ancestors.
While it would be unfair to say he was the first to suppose evolution, Darwin is synonymous with providing a working theory on how this process takes place, basing his work on other thinkers of the age, such as Charles Lyell, Thomas Malthus, and William Paley. As Cuvier argued in favor of Catastrophism, in which each of these epochs saw their own distinct organisms before ending by some natural purge, Lyell surmised nature took a more gradual approach, with Uniformitarianism, which held that change in climate on a global scale spurred change in species more often than catastrophes. Malthus proposed that population growth tended to outpace the availability of resources, creating competition for survival. Paley would argue that the complexity of life evidences a divine designer. That these thinkers and their contemporaries were predominantly theologians, perhaps shows that science and religion were not always at odds with each other, and the driving force of these pursuits was to better understand God’s creation. And it was this natural theology which initially had a strong influence on Darwin’s education at Cambridge. For nature, he saw religion and science as two sides of the same coin, though his conclusions would later challenge traditional Christian beliefs on creation.
Put simply, Darwin’s theory of evolution states that individuals within a population with traits advantageous to their environments are more apt to surviving and thus, producing more offspring which share these favorable characteristics. As time goes on, these incremental changes begin to accumulate, causing populations to adapt and at times even form entirely new species. Some major pushbacks to his theory in the Americas revolved around its conflict with religious teachings, in particular with the biblical story of Genesis, and the idea that humans and apes share a common ancestry; that people were not created in God’s image.