🌊 Ripple · counterfactual
What if On the Origin of Species had gone differently?
1859 · britain
Darwin shows how natural selection can produce the whole tree of life without a designer.
If it had gone differently: Life stays something designed rather than evolved; biology and half of modern thought lose their organising principle.
What it set up
- 1865Germ theory of disease, Doctors keep blaming bad air; surgery stays a death sentence and cities stay killing grounds.
- 1953The structure of DNA, How life stores its instructions stays a mystery; molecular biology, genetic medicine and biotech never get started.
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