ABSTRACT
This chapter covers the pre-Darwin ideas on evolution, views of Darwin and his critics plus their limitations and implications. It discusses the evolutionary ideas in the major religions, which were in fact the ideas that persisted prior to Darwin. The chapter also presents a short discussion of the possible missing components in the theories of evolution of the humans. Most pre-Darwin views on evolution were part of religious beliefs. All sorts of beliefs and hypotheses were in vogue up until the dawn of modern science in the late seventeenth or early eighteenth centuries. Evolution is via procreation as well as natural selection. An important feature of human evolution has been the development of the skull, and rising cranial capacity. Evolution from ape to man has also seen changes in the way life has been orchestrated and organized with evolving improvements in tools, fire-making, shelter, clothing, domestication of plants and animals, arts and crafts, cooperative and social organization and so on.
