Practice 4　　Charles Darwin didn’t want to murder God, as he once put it. But he did. He didn’t want to defy his fellow Cantabrigians, his gentlemanly Victorian society, his devout wife. But he did. He waited 20 years to publish his theory of natural selection, but—fittingly, after another scientist threatened to be first—he did.　　Before Darwin, most people accepted some version of biblical creation. Humans were seen as the apotheosis of godly architecture. Humans could thus be an accident of natural selection, not a direct product of God. Worries about how much his theory would shake society exacerbated the strange illnesses he suffered. It’s also worth noting that Darwin’s life wasn’t Darwinian: he achieved his wealth through inheritance, not competition, and some might say his sickly children suffered because they were inbred.　　Darwin’s theories still provoke opposition. One hundred and forty years after The Origin of Species, backers of creationism have made a comeback in states like Kansas, pushing evolution out of the schoolroom. Yet Darwinism remains one of the most successful scientific theories ever promulgated. There is hardly an element of humanity—not capitalism, not gender relations, certainly not biology—that can be fully understood without its help.