aid 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 select...
