Jenn Dodwell's blog

 As the theory of evolution was being developed, scientists had to work a lot of things out in order to generate a “story” that was plausible and convincing. This called for especially rigorous attention to detail, since they were competing with the theory of creationism which said that variation of living things over time is not a result of interactions with their environment, but rather is a reflection of the Divine Plan; a plan that is fixed, and that foresees and governs every change we see in the living world.  Some of the various problems that scientists had to work out to make a credible case for evolution included: How could they find proof for a process that had taken place over thousands of years, and for which the evidence was extremely scattered?  What were the basic units of change; were they whole species, individual organisms, or individual genes?  Finally, the biggest question they had to attempt to answer was: Why does evolution happen?  Why don’t living things just stay the same?