Two related beliefs helped rule out any possibility of a seventeenth-century Darwin. The first was the assumption that every feature of the world had been put there for man’s benefit. Every plant, every animal, every rock existed to serve us. The world contained wood, the Cambridge philosopher Henry More explained, because otherwise human houses would have been only “a bigger sort of beehives or birds’ nests, made of contemptible sticks and straw and dirty mortar.” It contained metal so that men could assault one another with swords and guns, rather than sticks, as they enjoyed the “glory and
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