Charles Lyell

© Robert E. Gentet 2015

Charles Lyell's (1797-1875) uniformitarian model expanded the ideas of Hutton. Lyell (a lawyer) reasoned that geologic processes were very slow and therefore the strata represented millions of years of time. Lyell first believed in divine creation. Charles Darwin (1809-1882) took Lyell's geology books with him on his famous voyage on the Beagle where he formulated his ideas about evolution. Lyell's books convinced Darwin that the Earth was very old. Darwin's theory of evolution required long spans of time. After Darwin's Origin of Species was published (1859), Lyell became an evolutionist. Darwin had been taught that the Bible dictated that species can't change. (The Bible says no such thing. The belief was handed down in the Church from Aristotle.) When Darwin saw contrary evidence, he lost faith in the Bible. It should be noted that Darwin's theory of "survival of the fittest" does not answer the question of the arrival of the fittest. The mechanism for the arrival of new genetic information has always been the biggest unsolved problem for the Theory of Evolution.