Charles Darwin – is he ‘the man who killed God1 ’?
"The point to make about Darwin's theory of evolution is that it is no longer a theory, but a fact. No serious scientist would deny the fact that evolution has occurred, just as he would not deny the fact that the earth goes around the sun."
Sir Julian Huxley, humanist and evolutionary scientist
(1887 – 1975)
Charles Darwin (pictured left) spent forty years of his life in his home just a few hundred yards from Downe Baptist Church. Today this house is a popular museum to him and his theory.
'The tree-of-life concept was absolutely central to Darwin's thinking, equal in importance to natural selection, according to biologist W. Ford Doolittle of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. Without it the theory of evolution would never have happened. The tree also helped carry the day for evolution. Darwin argued successfully that the tree of life was a fact of nature, 
plain for all to see though in need of explanation. The explanation he came up with was evolution by natural selection...For much of the past 150 years, biology has largely concerned itself with filling in the details of the tree. "For a long time the holy grail was to build a tree of life," says Eric Bapteste, an evolutionary biologist at the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris, France. A few years ago it looked as though the grail was within reach. But today the project lies in tatters, torn to pieces by an onslaught of negative evidence. Many biologists now argue that the tree concept is obsolete and needs to be discarded. "We have no evidence at all 
that the tree of life is a reality," says Bapteste. That bombshell has even persuaded some that our fundamental view of biology needs to change.' (New Scientist, 21 January 2009 by Graham Lawton)
Today Darwin's theory of evolution is taught in schools as a fact and TV programmes abound that popularise this idea, but just how true is it? Use the blue navigation bar to the left of this page to find out more about Carles Darwin the man, his theory and the problems with it, and vitally whether or not it matters what we believe.