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Seems to have been a human impulse to explain and understand that this is unknown or puzzling. Folklore, even the most primitive human tribe, showing that they have made some pondering problems origin and history of view of the world. They have thought about the question: what kind of people from around the world, or what? What is the future? How we human origin? Many of the answers to these questions are due in the tribal myths. Most often the existence of the world is simply as a matter of course, because at that time we did not think that it has been like now, but there are also countless stories of the origin or the creation of man.           An Evolving World     Mankind apparently has always had an urge to explain and understand that which is unknown or puzzling. The folklore of even the most primitive human tribes indicates that they had given some thought to questions about the origin and history of the world. They had thought about such questions as: Who or what gave rise to the world? What will the future bring? How did we humans originate? Numerous answers to these questions were given in tribal myths. Most often the existence of the world was simply taken for granted, as was the belief that it had always been as it is now, but there were innumerable stories about the origin or creation of man.   Later on the founders of religions, as well as the philosophers, also tried to find answers to these questions. When one studies these answers, one can sort them into three classes: (1) a world of infinite duration, (2) a constant world of short duration, and (3) an evolving world.   (1) A world of infinite duration   The Greek philosopher Aristotle believed that the world had always been in existence. Some philosophers thought that this eternal world had never changed, that it was constant; others thought it was going through different stages ("cycling") but would ultimately always return to an earlier stage. However, such a belief in an infinite age of the world was never very popular. There seems to have been an urge to account for a beginning.   (2) A constant world of short duration   This was, of course, the Christian view, as presented in the Bible. It was the prevailing view of the Western world in the Middle Ages and up to the middle of the nineteenth century. It was based on a belief in a supreme being, an all-powerful God, who had created the entire world as well as the human species, as described in the two stories of creation in the Bible (Genesis)…   The Rise of Evolutionism   Beginning with the Scientific Revolution in the seventeenth century, more and more scientific observations were in conflict with the biblical story. Its credibility was gradually being weakened by a series of discoveries. The Copernican Revolution was the first development to demonstrate that not every statement in Bible could be interpreted literally. The newly developing science was at first primarily concerned with astronomy, that is, with the sun, the stars, the planets, and other physical phenomena. It was inevitable that in due time the early practitioners of science would feel compelled to find explanations for many other phenomena in the world.   Discoveries in other sciences also raised new puzzling questions. The research of geologists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries revealed the immense age of the Earth, while the discovery of extinct fossil faunas undermined the belief in the constancy and permanence of Creation. Even though more and more evidence contradicted the assumption of the constancy of the world and its short duration, even though more and more voices were heard among scientists and philosophers questioning the validity of the biblical story, and even though the naturalist Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck had proposed in 1809 a full-fledged evolutionary theory, a more or less biblical worldview prevailed up to 1859, not only among laypeople but also among natural scientists and philosophers. It provided a simple answer to all questions about the world: God had created it and he had designed his created world so wisely that every organism was perfectly adapted to its place in nature.   ... Eventually, the evidence for the conclusion that the world is not constant but is forever changing became so overwhelming that it could no longer be denied. The result was the proposal and eventual adoption of a third worldview.   (3) An evolving world   According to this third view, the world is of long duration and is forever changing; it is evolving. Even though this may seem strange to us moderns, the concept of evolution was at first alien to Western thought. The power of Christian fundamentalist dogma was so strong that it required a long series of developments in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries before the idea of evolution became fully acceptable. As far as science is concerned, the acceptance of evolution meant that the world could no longer be considered merely as a seat of activity of physical laws but had to incorporate history and, more importantly, the observed changes in the living world in the course of time. Gradually the term "evolution" came to represent these changes.   ... Evolutionary thinking spread throughout the second half of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century, not only in biology but in linguistics, philosophy, sociology, economics, and other branches of thought. Yet, on the whole, in science it remained for a long time a minority view. The actual shift from the belief in a static worldview to evolutionism was caused by the dramatic event of the publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species on the 24th of November in 1859.         — Ernst Mayr, What Evolution Is                       Indexes/17