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Why was Charles Darwin the ‘most dangerous man in England’ in 1859? Below are some statements explaining why Charles Darwin was the most dangerous man in England. Can you place them in the correct chronological order? By the time Charles Darwin died in 1882 millions of people believed that God did not exist. By 1882 many people believed that science had disproved Christianity. In 2011 people still argue about whether the theory of evolution or the Bible has the right explanation for how the world was made. In 1865 Robert FitzRoy ended his life by cutting his throat. If Darwin was right that man was an ape then there was no reason why man should obey God or the Church. Robert FitzRoy was so angry he waved a Bible above his head and shouted ‘The Book, the Book’ because Charles Darwin had challenged the Bible. The Bible said that Adam and Eve were specially made by God. Charles Darwin seemed to suggest that man was just a well-developed ape. Darwin talked about ‘natural selection’. Animals adapted and changed to suit the world around them. New creatures developed more or less by accident. Darwin found fossils of sea shells high up in the Andes mountains. He found out that a violent earthquake had happened recently and pushed the land up out of the sea. When Darwin returned to England from the Galapagos Islands he decided not to become a vicar and continued his studies as a naturalist. Darwin published his ideas about how animals changed over time in The Origin of the Species in 1859. In 1830 Captain Robert FitzRoy left Plymouth Harbour in a small ship called HMS Beagle. Sharing his cabin was a young man called Charles Darwin. Charles Darwin’s job on the voyage to South America was to gather information about the animals, plants and rocks he saw wherever the ship took him. In 1830 Charles Darwin had left Cambridge University and was expecting to become a vicar. He had always been interested in nature. By 1830 several scientists had studied rocks and fossils and said the world had taken thousands of years to develop. They called this slow change evolution. When Charles Darwin visited the Galapagos Islands he noticed how animals such as the giant tortoises were slightly different on each island. Captain FitzRoy told Darwin that the skeletons of strange creatures were the animals that missed Noah’s Ark at the time of the Flood.