This week we look at how evolution is sold to us using a narrative that doesn't always match reality as we get ready to start the journey from lifelessness to life.
“So far as I can understand, his chief occupation in life was knocking his wife about…I have never happened to come upon the evidence for the idea; and I do not know on what primitive diaries or prehistoric divorce reports it is founded.” G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, 1925 Page 21
“He produces his little bone, or little collection of bones, and deduces the most marvelous things from it. He found in Java a piece of a skull, seeming by its contour to be smaller than the human. Somewhere near it he found an upright thighbone and in the same scattered fashion some teeth that were not human…If they all form part of one creature, which is doubtful, our conception of the creature would be almost equally doubtful. But the effect on popular science was to produce a complete and even complex figure, finished down to the last details of hair and habits. He was given a name as if he were an ordinary historical character. People talked of Pithecanthropus as of Pitt or Fox or Napoleon. Popular histories published portraits of him like the portraits of Charles the First or George the Fourth…A detailed drawing was reproduced, carefully shaded, to show that the very hairs of his head were all numbered. No uninformed person looking at its carefully lined face and wistful eyes would imagine for a moment that this was the portrait of a thighbone, or of a few teeth and a fragment of a cranium.” G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, 1925 Page 36
