Instead, the whole process that has fashioned the dazzling display of animals, plants and micro-organisms that cover the Earth is, we are told, driven ultimately by blind chance. Evolution has become the really big battleground for the righteous – or perhaps, more accurately, the self-righteous – in the conflict between science and religion, particularly between militant atheists and Christian fundamentalists. For those who take Genesis literally, evolutionary theory has not only to be rejected but also actively anathematized. The first book of the Bible states that God made all plants, sea creatures, birds and land animals (in that order) ‘according to their kinds’ – as individual, and by implication, fixed species. If, as science now understands it, different species developed one from another, then the biblical account is basically just wrong. Even worse to the Genesis literalists is the notion that humans – to whose creation God is supposed to have devoted special care and attention, making us ‘in his own image’, no less – are part of that scheme, that we have evolved from lower animals.
