CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN stands among the giants of Western thought because he convinced a majority of his peers that all of life shares a single, if complex, history. He taught us that we can understand life's history in purely naturalistic terms, without recourse to the supernatural or divine.

Time Frames: The Rethinking of Darwinian Evolution and The Theory, of Punctuated Equilibria, PREFACE (p. 13), Simon & Schuster. 1985