rly 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,...
