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In 1850 everyone in Europe and the Americas, except some scattered souls, was a creationist. Controversy simmered occasionally over whether evolution may have played a role in forming Earth's species, but evolutionary theory, as espoused anonymously in the popular book, "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation", published in 1844, seemed to religious leaders and scientists alike to be implausible, so the controversy quickly died down. Throughout the Judeo-Christian world, the populace accepted that Earth, all its inhabitants and the universe that surrounds them were created in six days as explained in the first two chapters of Genesis, the first book of the Holy Bible.

Nine years later, in 1859, Charles Darwin published his book, "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection". Darwin marshaled over two decades of personal observations, including his famed voyage aboard the HMS Beagle, along with the research and observations of many contemporary scientists, to argue that life on Earth had taken their present forms over many millions of years and that all life may have descended from one or several primitive organisms. Unlike the author of "Vestiges", he proposed a mechanism that accomplished the transformations: natural selection. Traits most beneficial to a life form helped it survive, thus making it more likely to pass the traits down to future generations. In time, the traits became dominant. This seemed to contradict Genesis which said God created all living things "according to their kinds", but it agreed with the accumulating evidence from fossils and species living in diverse habitats that suggested that life forms changed over time in response to changes in their environment.

The eminent biologist Thomas Henry Huxley was one of many scientists who were not swayed by the theory of evolution described in "Vestiges" but was impressed by the thoroughness of Darwin's presentation in "Origin of the Species". In his essay, "The Darwinian Hypothesis", written upon the publication of "Origin", he wrote of Darwin "...all the principles he lays down are capable of being brought to the test of observation and experiment." Huxley became the foremost spokesman for Darwin's theory, though even he withheld judgment about the ability of natural selection to produce new species. He observed that humans could employ artificial selection to breed new types of animals, but none of their efforts had ever created a new species. It's this barrier that creationists

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