say on the subject:"Darwin is supposed, by those who have not read him, to be the man who thought of evolution and who said that men were descended from monkeys. Neither notion is even half true." (4) The authors of Anthropology Today agree: "The belief that evolutionary theory began with Charles Darwin is widespread but incorrect."(5)Even Leakey and Isaac, after their monumental tribute to Darwin in Human Ancestors, had to admit: "Darwin was not the first to consider the possibility that life, including human life, had originated through a prolonged process of gradual change involving natural rather than supernatural mechanisms."(6) First of all, let us find out what evolution is supposed to be; let us define it. Evolution is the theory that all living organisms supposedly have transformed from one species into another through a gradual process of adaptation to changing environmental conditions, which transformation is said to have taken place through the extremely fortuitous timing of natural selection, hybridization, inbreeding and (more recently) mutation, and that through this process all living species are descended from a common natural ancestor, and fish became amphibians that turned into reptiles that turned into mammals etc. etc. We will deal with the evidence and possibility of this having ever occurred throughout the remaining chapters of this work. For now the definition is adequate for our purposes.Often it is implied that the theory of evolution is some new, scientific theory that replaced old, primitive ideas of a supernatural creation by an supreme Being. This line of thought is expressed in the Encyclopedia Britannica (7): "Evolution provided the first unifying, general principle to all living things," however "in legends of creation popular among the peoples of antiquity-Sumerians, Egyptians, Greeks, and Hebrews, whose sacred book, the Torah, known to Christians as the Old Testament, contains two descriptions of the ...
