IT STARTED WITH DARWIN. Here is a stunning factoid. Before Darwin’s 1859 book, On the Origin of the Species, which suggested life arose in a warm pond, nobody in Western society questioned the origin of life, which was deemed to be God-given. The answer to this question was simply taken as a given. Ancient peoples the world over had creation myths, but these became suffused under the blanket of orthodox christian thinking in the West for about two thousand years. Genesis became our dominant myth.