There was a young scientist a little more than 100 years ago who puzzled over how to observe the world. He puzzled over what was important and what was not. In his frustration, he noted everything only hopefully to sort out meaning when he could. He enjoyed the ability to "pump" with this associates as he pondered the nature of things. He hated disagreements and discontentment. He both sought out the company of others interested in science and stood apart to study at his leisure in quiet or on long, morning walks. To learn something new about the world, he needed this environment. His name was Charles Darwin. He knew that what he discovered in his learning would start a war of values, disagreements, and discontentment. It actually was the strength of what he learned that led to this predicament of western society.
Darwin saw that nature was not immutable or unchangeable but was constantly changing as a result of something called natural selection. It was natural selection that fueled the process of adaptation through differential survival and reproduction. Darwin's most convincing proof of his theory of natural selection was the evidence of breeding of horses, cattle or dogs. This artificial or man-made selective process was his key that people most readily understood. But it was the unusual or imperfect that caught Charles Darwin's attention. It was the panda's thumb, an orchid, or tortoises on different islands that led Darwin to his powerful theory of natural selection. It was the unusual and imperfect that demonstrated the power of nature in selecting the most fit - those who survived and reproduced best.
What Darwin started in this war within society was a collision between world views. Anthropologists recognize that every culture forms a world view - a way of classifying, structuring, and organizing the world as they know it. It is a way of ensuring that people know what something is and how it fits. There is no uncertainty. World views shape our understanding of many things including where we come from as humans. It explains our place in the world; that is part of structuring and organizing. What Charles Darwin created was a new scientific world view of origins. It with an older and well established view of origins set forth in the Book of Genesis.
Evolution as Darwin saw it contradicted the biblical account of creation by proposing that the universe came into being over a vast period of time, and that living forms descended with modification from earlier ones. It questioned the divine intervention of creation. By the early 1900s, fundamentalist Christians were convinced that acceptance of evolution breeds theological and moral questions. Henry Morris, the most influential creationists of this century, associates evolution with communism, fascism, atheism among other things. He advocates that it is a vehicle by which to reject God. Some fundamentalists believe that anyone who accepts evolution is lost and will face eternal damnation.