““It would be a kindness, by the way, and a service to history, if you could please rid yourself of the legend that Christians believed a fairy tale about the origin of the world until forced to think otherwise by the triumph of secular science. Substantially everyone in the Judeo-Christian bits of the planet believed the Genesis account until the early nineteenth century, remember, there being till then no organised alternative. The work of reading the geological record, and thereby exploding the Genesis chronology, was for the most part done not by anti-Christian refuseniks but by scientists and philosophers thinking their way onward from starting-points within the religious culture of the time. Once it became clear that truth lay elsewhere than in Genesis, religious opinion on the whole moved with impressive swiftness to accommodate the discovery. In the same way, when the Origin of Species was published, most Christians in Britain at least moved with some speed to incorporate evolutionary biology into their catalogue of ordinary facts about the world. Bishop Samuel Wilberforce’s resistance to Darwinism was an outlier, untypical. In fact, there’s a good case to be made that the ready acceptance of evolution in Britain owed a lot to the great cultural transmission mechanism of the Church of England. If you’re glad that Darwin is on the £10 note, hug an Anglican.””
![“In the beginning of the eighteenth century, De Maillet made the first serious attempt to apply the doctrine [ of evolution ] to the living world. In the latter part of it, Erasmus Darwin , Goethe , and Lamarck took up the work more vigorously and with better qualifications. The question of special…” quote by Thomas Henry Huxley](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/d37/thomas-henry-huxley-14414_benoit-de-maillet_in-the-beginning-of-the-eighteenth-centu_2375328.jpg)
