For the longest time, the Bible had been the history book of the Western World. People had based their families, societies, kingdoms and livelihood on the information based in the Bible, information which, until the 1500's had not been challenged. The theories of Galileo and Sir Isaac Newton had challenged the beliefs of many Catholics; it seemed to them that their trust in the Bible was being questioned. For many it was too much; some lost faith in the Bible, others proceeded to keep a firm belief in the Bible's teachings despite the challenges of the scientific community, only being forced to submit to the overwhelming facts later on. The new Theory of Evolution, presented to the world by Charles Darwin in the book The Origin of the Species in 1859, yet again attacked the validity of the Bible. It professed that, on his journey on the Beagle for five years, he noticed that the theory of natural selection was the only thing that he observed in his studies of species from all over the world. This theory helped to support the idea of evolution, a topic of great controversy at the time, whish in turn attacked the Bible in its belief of Adam and Eve, Noah's Ark and Genesis. This new theory not only weakened the Church, but forced it to undergo its own form of adaptation; the attacks of scientific theory forced the Church to adapt in order to grow back.
The theory of Natural Selection says that "populations change over time as the frequency of advantageous alleles increases. These could accumulate over time to result in adaptation and speciation." If one were to be in an environment where water could only be found on the cup-shaped leaves of a very tall tree and there were two different ground-based species in that area, the one most capable of getting to the water (e.g. long neck) would be the ones to survive, the other species would die-out unless it could find another niche where as to get water.