Extinction, Darwin Overlooked

Great AukIn The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin envisioned that “extinction and natural selection go hand in hand.” Extinction, however, was a relatively new concept only emerging in revolutionary France following the publication of Essay on the Theory of the Earth in 1813 by French naturalist Georges Cuvier.

“All these facts, consistent among themselves,” Cuvier argued, “seem to me to prove the existence of a world previous to ours… And what revolution was able to wipe it out [extinction]?”

Cuvier was an iconic French scientist who established extinction as a field of inquiry. When completed in time for the 1889 World’s Fair, his name was one of the only seventy-two names inscribed onto the Eiffel Tower.

Elizabeth Kolbert explains in The Sixth Extinction (2014) that the discovery of extinction made evolution seem “as unlikely as levitation,” an issue Darwin conveniently overlooked.

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Oxygen, Evolution’s Achilles Heel

Earth Atmosphere

Oxygen is one of life’s most essential atomic elements. As molecular biologist Michael Denton highlights in his book “Nature’s Destiny, How the Laws of Biology Reveal Purpose in the Universe,” oxygen is the key element for “one of the most important chemical reactions on Earth.”

While oxygen is the third most abundant chemical element in the universe, after hydrogen and helium, oxygen is the most abundant chemical element by mass in the Earth’s biosphere, air, sea, and land adding one more agonizing Achilles Heel to the theory of evolution.

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