EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGY
As Loren Eiseley has written (1962, "The Firmament of Time") in order for evolution to be discovered, first scientists would have to discover that species death was natural and pervasive in Earth history.
Thus, Charles Darwin in 1859 was able to launch the idea of biological evolution in his "On the Origin of Species." But Darwin did not then know of mass extinction, which would gradually come to be accepted only in the mid 20th century. Here is a quote from Loren Eisleley's essay, "How Death Became Natural": Results:"It is necessary in surveying the human quest for certainty to consider death before life. I have not done this out of perversity. Rather I have done it because, in the sequence of ideas we have been studying, it is necessary to understand certain aspects of death before we can comprehend the nature of life and its changes. Man, even primitive man, has tended to take life for granted. Death was the unnatural thing, the result of malice or mistake, the after-thought of the gods, or, in the Christian world, the result of the Fall from the Garden. In the development of a scientific approach to life on this planet, therefore, the recognition of death - species death, phylogenetic death - had to precede the rise of serious evolutionary thought. For without the knowledge of extinction in the past, it is impossible to entertain ideas of drastic organic change going on in the present or future."