In the London Review of Books a rather caustic article on a book entitled Can a Darwinian be a Christian?: The Relationship between Science and Religion sparked a swift rebuke from the author. The latter complained that the reviewer's attitude really belonged to those people to whom the reviewer himself would be diametrically opposed, namely, Creationists, and that he was playing into their hands by insisting that Darwinism and Christianity were fundamentally incompatible. What is striking is not so much that this academic dispute is about a controversial issue (although in fact it is), but that the book concerned was published in December 2001 and the review the following May. Darwin has been in his grave for well over a century and yet many of the controversies his work provoked remain burning issues for large swathes of people in the Western world. Although the fields of evolutionary psychology and, particularly, genetics have moved many of the arguments forward, the resistance to Darwin's original arguments remains entrenched. With the countless reams of supporting scientific evidence produced since the publication of The Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871), it might be thought that such objections would have been extinguished some time ago, but the potency of Darwin's hypotheses is such that for many they continue to turn the universe on its head.

These present controversies give some idea of the nature of the seismic shift which evolutionary theory caused to the mid- to late-nineteenth-century mindset. However, although the measure of Darwin's impact should not be underestimated, it was not entirely unexpected. Diego Núñez comments:

Progress as a concept appeared to be well-served by Darwinian theory, with the French Positivists seeming to have found a new ally in biological science.