Lamarck was a pupil of Buffon’s, as were many of the other early evolutionists. Gordon Taylor wrote of Lamarck, who anticipated many of Darwin’s ideas, that “Particularly unfair to him was Darwin, who skimmed through one of his books and pronounced it a farrago of nonsense,” (15) yet we find Taylor praising Lamarck thusly: “Though Lamarck’s name has become covered with contumely, he was in fact a great naturalist: his contributions to the classification of the invertebrates alone are sufficient to have earned him an honored place in the history of biology. More than this, he can claim to be the first biologist to propose a theory of evolution . . .” (16)
We find from the pen of Lamarck: “Species cannot be distinguished completely from each other; they pass into one another, proceeding from the simple Infusoria right up to man” (1802). He wrote in 1809, the year of Darwin’s birth: “Every observant and cultivated person knows that nothing on the surface of this earth remains forever the same. Everything undergoes in time the most gradual changes which take place at varying degrees of rapidity, depending on its own nature and circumstances . . . these changing environmental conditions bring about a change in the requirements, customs and manner of living of animals, which in turn results in a transformation and development of organisms. Thus these are subject to imperceptible change, even though such change only becomes noticeable after a considerable period of time.”
Often evolutionists have attempted to imply that before the advent of Darwin biological thought was in a condition of disorder, but that Darwin somehow stepped in and straightened the whole thing out, with of course the usual tie in with religious preconceptions as a primary cause for the problem being strongly hinted at. Typical of this line of thought is this quote from Encyclopedia Britannica: “Evolution is the kernel of biology. It is significant that, before Darwin established evolution as a fact and showed how it was brought about, biology was in a state of chaos.”(17)
Wallace, King and Sanders wrote in their book Biosphere, The Realm of Life (18): “In Darwin’s time, by his own account, all serious biologists believed that species (specific kinds of plants and animals, such as pineapples and dogs) were fixed and unchanging. But On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural selection, Darwin’s great work, changed all of that . . . The Darwinian revolution swept away a lot of age-old assumptions. The most painful loss, of course, was Darwin’s dispensing with the necessity of assuming a wise, foresightful creator. Also dispensed with, as unproved and unnecessary, were other deeply held assumptions. The theory of evolution challenged the previously accepted idea that each species was a permanent, fixed entity; that had to go. . .Darwin argued that the species had no reality other than that of the individuals composing it, and that the idea of a species was just a category invented by the human mind . . .”
This seems rather ironic however when we find from another Encyclopedia article that, “The Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778) became known as the father of modern taxonomy through his major work Systema Natura [The System of Nature] first published in 1735. Linnaeus, however believed that each species was created by God and incapable of change.” (19)
Linnaeus, the father of the discipline of taxonomic categorizing of species of plants and animals, whose system, known as the Linnaean System, is still the basis for classifying plants and animals used today, confronted and confounded the evolutionists of his day, because he believed and proved that species could be classified in an orderly manner based on the distinctive types of creatures, referring to the Genesis kinds spoken of in the Bible.
Thus, and this is fully accepted today by all competent zoologists, there are distinct classes of animals, fitting into the various Kingdoms, Phyla, Sub-phyla, Class, Order, Family, Genus, and Species. It seems incredible that Wallace, King and Sanders can defend Darwin’s illogical and mistaken assertion that species do not exist, yet this is not uncommon with modern defenders of evolutionary theory. It is interesting that none of the names of any of the evolutionists of that period are used for modern scientific terminology in botany or zoology, nor are their ideas very much even discussed when classifying animals, only the name Linneaus is used in reference to the Linnaean system he developed for us.
It is also a mistatement to assert, as Wallace, King and Sanders seem to imply, that Christian belief did not allow for variation within species. Obviously orthodox Christian belief would not imply that all humans are exactly alike simply because we are all descended from one pair of human beings. All men are created equal, but we all have different physical attributes. The many varieties of bears, the grizzly, the brown bear, the black bear and the polar bear for example, in a Biblical framework, were all descended from one pair of ancestors, and have adapted to their various locales, not through developing new traits or changing into new species, but through the initial genetic potential that they inherited. This is known as variation within species, which many Christian writers even in Darwin’s day believed in, as according to the wise plan of the Creator, who put this potential into the make-up of animals for survival in diverse climates, geographic locations, etc., but the bears remained bears nonetheless, there was no evidence of their having evolved from or evolved into any other species of animal but a bear.
As far as Darwin contributing anything of order to the science of biology, a more objective view would be from Gordon Taylor, who wrote: “If Darwin plunged us into a hopeless world of chance it was because he was in reaction from a philosophical and theological position . . .”(20)
Taylor further said that Darwinist philosophy: “. . . presented the living world as a world of chance, determined by material forces, in place of a world determined by a divine plan.”(21)
Another giant of science who opposed the evolutionists of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was the French statesman and zoologist Baron Cuvier (1769-1832). Cuvier is regarded as the father of the modern sciences of comparative anatomy and paleontology. Cuvier maintained that all species were special created by God for a special purpose, and that each organ in the body had been created for a special function. He argued correctly that it would be impossible for any creature to survive any significant change in its structure, although he did make allowance for variation within certain limits, which as has been stated is totally in accordance with the Biblical view.
All of the ideas in the Origin were already widely known and read before and during Darwin’s time, so it is evident that he was not propounding anything at all that original. Even in his Historical Sketch, which Darwin wrote as a preface to the later editions of the Origin after Lyell called him to task for not giving enough credit to his predecessors, he belatedly admitted that he was not the first to come up with the idea. There he wrote of “the celebrated botanist and palaeontologist Unger” who had published his belief in gradual modification and change of species in 1852, seven years before Darwin’s publication of the Origin. (22)
Darwin claimed that the main ingredient in this process of evolution (though not the only one, the extermination of whole populations of animals, as seen in the above quote, was very much a part of his idea of biological “improvement”) was natural selection: “I have now recapitulated the facts and considerations which have thoroughly convinced me that species have been modified, during a long course of descent. This has been effected chiefly through the natural selection of numerous successive, slight favorable variations: aided in an important manner by the inherited effects of the use and disuse of parts. . .”(Darwin, Origin, pp.239)
We find though that even Darwin’s idea of natural selection was not original either. Professor William Lawrence, F.R.S., wrote of natural selection in 1822, years before Darwin sailed on the Beagle. Darwin wrote, in what seems a rather petulant tone, in his Historical Sketch a response to critics accusing him of trying to take credit for an idea that was not his own. He revealed: “As far as the mere enunciation of the principle of natural selection is concerned, it is quite immaterial whether or not Professor Owen preceded me, for both of us, as shown in this historical sketch, were long ago preceded by Dr. Wells and Mr. Matthew.” (Historical Sketch to later editions of the Origin.) Jacques Barzun wrote that, “Anyone in fact, who would gauge the familiarity of the European mind with evolutionary ideas before Darwin need do no more than reread Tennyson’s In Memoriam. There he will find not only. . . natural selection, but likewise man’s kinship with the ape, the chain of beings, their development, and the consequences to religion and morals of the thoroughgoing naturalism of science.”(23)
While Darwin was still a youth it appears that the entire culture of England was awash with evolutionary ideas. Years before he even set foot on the Beagle, we find a collection of anecdotes on monkeys titled Apology Addressed to the Travelors Club, or anecdotes of Monkeys published in 1825, which were written , according to Geoffrey Bourne, with “the double objective of making the ideas of the evolutionists look foolish and of satirizing human weaknesses.”(24)
Loren Eiseley informs us: “Charles Darwin did not compose the theory out of thin air. All of the elements which were to enter into it were being widely discussed during his college years.” (25)
At first Darwin claimed that his method of observation and deduction was based on the empirical, scientific method of Bacon: “I worked on true Baconian principles and without any theory collected facts on a wholesale scale,” i.e. let the facts speak for themselves, but he contradicted himself later on and did not in fact use this method. De Beer tells us: “This was invalidated by Darwin himself when he wrote to Lyell (June 1, 1860): ‘Without the making of theories, I am convinced there would be no observations.” (26) Thus it appears that Darwin did not use a very scientific method when arriving at his conclusions. Reminiscent of Darwin’s penchant for telling fibs and spinning fantastic tales as a youth, De Beer again informs us that “Darwin’s method was to spin a hypothesis about anything that struck his attention (i.e. anything that he was predisposed by ideas to see) . . .” [the above words in parenthesis are not my addition but from the article itself.] (27)
It has been clearly demonstrated,contrary to the numerous tributes of praise to Charles Darwin at the beginning of this section, that he was by no means the first person to come up with the theory of evolution.
Having read of Darwin’own actual bleak academic background before his voyage on the Beagle, it should not surprise us to find out that the idea that he has been given credit for by so many of his followers, the evolution of species, was not his own idea in the least. What is suprising is that he has been hailed by these same followers as the great inovator of some grand new scheme of life, when nothing could be farther from the truth.
The so called “modern” theory of evolution itself has been around for thousands of years. It is not some novel development as a result of any scientific discovery, despite the claims of its most ardent adherents, but is simply the resurrection of an ancient, pagan creation myth, biased towards a materialistic, non-theistic view of the universe, which view has been warmly adopted by the cultural and liberal media elite from Darwin’s time on down to the present day, and foisted upon an unwitting public as the so-called “scientific” explanation of the universe and man’s role to play in it, when nothing could be farther from the truth.
What may be even more surprising is that Charles Darwin was not even the first Darwin to come up with the theory of evolution. Who was this other Darwin whose name was synonymous with the theory of evolution years before Darwin was even born?