Almost five thousand years ago… In the fertile soils of the Middle East, pagan religions prevailed in Mesopotamia,. These pagans generated a number of myths and superstitions about the origin of life and the universe. One of these was the belief in “evolution”. According to the Sumerian Enuma-Elish epic, life first appeared spontaneously in water and then evolved in one species from one another.
Many years later, the myth of evolution found fertile ground in another pagan civilisation, Ancient Greece. Some Greek philosophers, calling themselves "materialists", accepted only the existence of matter and counted matter as the original source of life. Consequently, they resorted to the myth of evolution, inherited from the Sumerians, to explain how living beings came into existence. Thus, ancient Greece became the junction point of materialist philosophy and the myth of evolution. The pagan Romans later cherished this heritage.
These two concepts from idol-worshipping cultures were introduced to the modern world in the 18th century. Some European intellectuals influenced by ancient Greek sources who accordingly adopted ‘materialism’ with one common belief: they were completely against the very idea of monotheistic religion. The book by the renowned materialist, Baron d'Holbach, The System of Nature was considered the "principal source of atheism."
In this context, the French biologist, Jean Baptist Lamarck, was the first person to give a detailed account of the theory of evolution. Lamarck's theory, which was later refuted, maintained that living beings evolved from one another through slight variations over time. It was Charles Darwin, who repeated and popularised Lamarck's views, albeit in a slightly different form.
Darwin revealed his views in England, in 1859 through the publication of his book The Origin of Species. Darwin’s book was in reality a detailed version of the evolution myth, originally introduced by the ancient Sumerians. His theory maintained that all the different species came from a common ancestor that appeared in water by chance which every living species had sprung from over time again by chance.
This assertion of Darwin was not based on any scientific grounds, and hence was not extensively adopted by the scientists of his time. Paleontologists in particular were aware that the entire theory was largely a figment of his imagination. The fossil record revealed that living things did not undergo an evolutionary process from the primitive to the complex. Even the living things which lived hundreds of millions years ago possessed the same complex structures of their counterparts living today. There was no trace of “transitional forms” that Darwin assumed to have existed and which were supposed to link one species to another. In the years to come, other assertions of the theory were refuted one after another. Biochemistry revealed that life was too complex to have emerged by chance as Darwin claimed. It was realized that even the random formation of the simplest protein molecule was impossible, let alone a living cell itself. Anatomy, on the other hand, showed that living beings had distinct designs and were created separately.
In brief, Darwin’s theory lacked a scientific basis. However, the theory was quick to gain political support, since it did provide the so-called "scientific basis" for the dominant powers of the 19th century.
