Francis Ayala sums up Darwin’s distinctive contribution as follows: It was Darwin’s greatest accomplishment to show that the complex organization and functionality of living beings can be explained as the result of a natural process—natural selection—without any need to resort to a Creator or other external agent. The origin and adaptations of organisms in their profusion and wondrous variations were thus brought into the realm of science.45 In other words, Darwin’s theory of natural selection effectively made any metaphysical or theological claim concerning the origins of life irrelevant. One
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