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Evolution: The Big Idea We All Ignore
Even though no intelligent educated person doubts the veracity of evolution, we act as if it has no application to us
Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace both had the same astonishing insight at around the same time back in the mid-1800s: that the present and past diversity of life on Earth is not the result of some invisible magical pixie summoning things into existence ex nihilo as various religious mythologies profess, but is in fact the consequence of thousands of tiny gradual adaptations by organisms to the surrounding environment. The ability of these two naturalists to arrive at this conclusion was shaped by earlier discoveries showing that the world was a great deal older than previously imagined, and that long prior to the existence of humans armed with trowels and other excavating tools, a great many exotic creatures had once roamed the planet yet today are nowhere to be seen.
Although neither Darwin nor Wallace could identify the precise mechanisms by means of which these gradual changes were made possible (Crick and Watson would only discover DNA a century later) the fact of such changes was apparent to those willing to see. Since then, evolution has been confirmed via a wide variety of evidence ranging from rapid evolution within laboratories using model…
