To understand what makes species evolve, you first must acknowledge that they do, to what extent and at what time scale. Buffon clearly was the first to underst

To understand what makes species evolve, you first must acknowledge that they do, to what extent and at what time scale. Buffon clearly was the first to understand the latter. There is a similar story with geology, and a similar pushback. A natural philosopher reported in the 18th century that locals in the Alps thought that there had been extinct glaciers, as the cause of massive solitary rocks in places where they couldn't just have rolled from a mountain. To established savant, this was clearly fanciful, as it contradicted the infallible Bible.