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So many of us love Science. It was our favorite subject in school. It made sense, it made us feel that this world is supposed  to make sense. That it works on logic and is, to the extent determined by our understanding of it, understandable, estimable, maybe even predictable. [Don't raise incongruous voices saying one shouldn't try to understand life, just enjoy it. Or if you could predict life, wouldn't it be boring? I'm not addressing generations that frequently complain of "ennui" (it's quite fashionable nowadays) spoilt such that they crave an escape from the luxury of security. I'm talking of people who struggle for necessities, for whom the predictability  that a certain medicine would fetch them a cure would be so very welcome. Or poor families that would like to derive peace from the knowledge that investing in education will someday bring them better standards of living.] Anyhow, the point was, that so many of us loved Science so much th

<< Previous page So what do we (did Darwin) know by now (then) ? That living creatures from the very very ancient past (we're talking in terms of millions of years) were often found preserved in the rock record. That we could make out some things about the past environments from these fossils. Fossils showed specific associations: you saw only certain types and groups of fossils in certain suites of rocks (belonging to different periods of geological time). There came a dead end at the base of the Cambrian. Scientists like to call this the Cambrian Explosion today, but back then, many of them were more inclined to dismiss this either as a figment of the imagination of relatively smaller body of researchers, or simply, incomplete/inaccurate science. That the Creator had made us all, was the popular view. 3 theories emerged to explain why we see the Cambrian Explosion (if it even is a real thing!): Charles Lyell Interestingly, it is said that Lyell was