Evolution Timeline

  • Darwin starts his secret nootbooks

    Darwin labeled one of his secret notebooks "Tranmutation of Species," and in it he sketched his first "tree of life."
  • Queen of Great Britain

    Victoria became the Queen of Great Britian
  • Medel's breakthroughs go unnoticed

    Mendel realized that many traits, such as the seedcolor of peas, are passed down in pairs of descrete units. Mendel's units are now called genes, but in 1865 his work went unnoticed.
  • President Lincoln

    President Lincoln was assassinated
  • Prime Minister of Great Britain

    Gladstone became the Prime Minister of Great Britain
  • Darwin was buried in Westminister Abbey

    Darwin's body was laid to rest in a place of honor, near the grace of Sir Isaac Newton. The Anglican Church has accepted evolution, and many people reconcile Darwin's view of life on Earth with their religious faiths.
  • Bible readings were required in public schools

    Most public schools in the US have long included Bible reading, but the new fundamentalist movement now brings a slow legal statutes in the South to ensure the practice.
  • Einstein's Theory

    Einstein postulates his General Theory of Relativity
  • Anti-evolution bills spread

    By the 1930's, many areas in which fundamentalists hold political sway have passed some form of restriction on teaching evolution.
  • The President of Germany

    Hindenburg became the President of Germany
  • Evolution was shunned in US schools

    One concerned scientist later estimates that less than half of all high school science teachers in the early 1940's taught anything about evolution.
  • Mass-murder

    Mass-murder of the Jews in gas chambers began
  • The DNA puzzle was solved

    Science has known for decades that genes determine the traits of living things and that they are passed down through generations, but it taked the discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA to unlock the details.
  • Workers rioted

    Workers rioted in East Germany
  • The Supreme Court banned prayers in schools

    The Supreme Court outlaws compulsory school prayer and Bible reading in two landmark cases.
  • Orbiting the Earth

    John Glenn orbited the Earth in a spacecraft
  • A new idea of humans and apes occured

    Breakthroughs in genetic science allows researchers to see striking similarities in the DNA blueprints for humans and apes.
  • Martin Luther King

    Martin Luther King led anti-Vietnam march in New York
  • DNA codes offer new evidence of evolution

    DNA, the genetic blueprint for living things, is like a text made up of chemical letters. For many decades, reading the sequence of letters in DNA was a painstaking process.
  • Nobel Peace Prize

    Michael Gorbachev won the Nobel Peace Prize