A Contested Theory.

In spite of its virtually universal acceptance among biologists as a fundamental scientific principle, evolution remained a point of contention in the 1990s in many classrooms, school boards, and among conservative Christian parents. Although the idea of natural selection occurred to naturalists Alfred Russel Wallace and Charles Robert Darwin at about the same time, Darwin got On the Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection; or, The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (1859) into print first, and it was his name that became attached to the theory. Both Darwin and Wallace had been looking for a way to explain biological diversity. Briefly put, the theory of evolution by means of natural selection posits that individuals within a population differ in small ways, and these variations can be inherited. Farmers in the nineteenth century knew, for example, that...