John van Wyhe (born 1971), is a British historian of science, with a focus on Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, at the National University of Singapore.
He accepted a Senior Research Fellowship at the National University of Singapore in 2002 where he both founded the Darwin Online project and edited the Science section of the Victorian Web.
For decades the most enlightened writers in the fields of science and religion had accepted that much of the Old Testament, and Genesis in particular, had to be read in a metaphorical sense... Darwin's theories inspired the whole gamut of reactions.
For such thinkers it was quite reasonable to reconcile Darwin's views with their religion... As the years passed and reviews and counter-reviews appeared, the fact of Darwinian evolution, the common descent of species became increasingly accepted...
As scientific, and non-scientific readers came increasingly to accept the Darwinian concept of common ancestry for species, the view that natural selection was the primary mechanism was often sidelined or rejected.