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ANOTHER LIFE: ‘MY THEOLOGY IS a simple muddle,” Charles Darwin wrote to a close friend towards the end of his life. And the man who so nearly became just another Victorian parson-naturalist provides the modern atheist with the rationale of being – evolution by natural selection. It seems possible, on the witness of a good many scientists, personally to hold Darwinian science and religious belief in separate mental pockets – Darwin certainly tried it. But as a fairly typical non-believer, I thank Darwin for making sense of my existence, along with all the other species on the planet.

Next month’s big anniversary of his birth (February 17th, 1809) has been given special import by the extraordinary new war on evolutionary biology led by US evangelical creationists and proponents of “intelligent design”. This has met with an appalled and militant response from mainstream western science, and a one-man counter-attack on all religion led by the British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins.