The book opens with Bishop Ussher’s calculation of the age of the earth. Drawing from biblical and classical sources he estimated that creation occurred on the 23rd October 4004 BC. It ends with current estimates of 4 billion years, calculated by the radioactive decay of uranium trapped in zircon crystals into lead. In between it charts the incredible story of how science gradually replaced christianity as the arbiter of truth amongst the elite establishment of Europe. It’s full of colourful personalities, from Mary Anning hunting for fossils on the Jurassic Coast, to Charles Darwin circumnavigating the globe, and onto the fierce and bitter rivalry between Richard Owen and Thomas Huxley, whose monumental buildings, The Natural History Museum and Imperial College, still square off against each other across Exhibition Road in Kensington. The book doesn’t say it, but it struck me that it describes not only the replacement of religion by science, but more fundamentally the replacement of a static epistemology of biblical authority with a darwinian one: survival of the fittest theory; from a thing to a process. So beautifully meta that the theory of evolution, devised to explain the history of the natural world, also explains the methodology used to derive it. The book also begs the question, that isn’t answered, of why the establishment orthodoxy was so successfully replaced. What was different about 19th C. Britain that allowed it to happen? Why there and then, and why not at any other point in history?