"Nothing is different but everything's changed"

Darwin stated that during his time on the HMS Beagle as he read Lyell’s Principles of Geology, he felt that he was seeing the world “through Lyell’s eyes.” He was supremely influenced by the reading and it helped derive the mechanism for Darwinian evolution. The constant, uniform changes over geological time which Lyell described were applied to the living world by Darwin. Although he did not fully understand the technical aspects of the idea, Darwin did understand that something about animals changed according to the environment with each generation. Now, this is understood to be a constant rate of genetic mutation which leads to slight shifts in phenotype which can be selected for or against by the environment where the organism lives. Just as Lyell saw a continuous presence of usually slight geological forces that shaped the world through their constancy, modern evolutionists recognize a continuous presence of genetic changes that slowly morph the organism. Although Darwin would have known little of the technical details, he certainly would have been able to see the phenotypic outcomes. He was able to see the incomplete pattern in the fossil record that inched from one form to another. In both geology and biology, although nothing was different about the forces working from generation to generation or from era to era, everything had changed as they slowly shaped the world. This seemingly contradictory statement can thus be applied to both sciences in order to make sense of so much of the world around us.

Lyrical inspiration for this post from Bishop Allen-“Calendar”