Evolution History
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Bronze age to the Silk Road
Light comes to Europe
Age of global empires
19th Century
The 19th Century was a time of great change. Population growth changed from linear to cubic to exponential. Monarchies fell. The role of religion in government withered in the West. Technological progress was astounding, and the status of science elevated. Secular philosophies florished, and secular sciences expanded dramatically. Psychology was established. Anthropology was established. The list goes on: modern geology, organic chemistry, electricity, photography. This amazing age also saw the publication of the Origin of Species, a work that firmly established humanity's connection with the rest of life and influenced many secular thinkers.
1812AD The swan song of creation science
Cuvier was a highly trained anatomist and functional morphologist. He understood extinction, and was the director of a collection of many fossils representing animals that were no longer in existence, but Cuvier argued that this was the result of multiple creation events. Cuvier wrote "There are no human fossil bones" when dismissing the Lake Constance skeleton in Recherches sur les ossemens fossiles des quadrupedes (Research on the Fossil Bones of Quadrupeds). Cuvier was extremely powerful, but he would soon eat many words. He was in denial of modern geology, he was incorret about the fixity of species, and he was incorrect about deep time. Cuvier was one of the last creationists to wield significant power in the academy of biological sciences.
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