"to hear stu talk, it would make you wonder how anything got invented before Darwin !"

Pete, can't you see the point I'm making? You can't isolate Darwin any more than you can Curie, Crick, Watson and Franklin, Fleming or Feynman. Darwin wasn't a person who worked in utter isolation, he was part of the scientific community that gave birth to modern science. Neither did he arrive at his conclusion alone; Wallace had independently discovered natural selection too and they were in touch before the publication of The Origin of Species.

All of this took place in a wider biological, palaentologoical and geological framework, which in turn relied on chemistry, physics etc and still does. The interconnected nature of our universe is one of it's wonders, we're part of it. Today a paper has been published in nature that demonstrates this perfectly: the asymmetry of biochemical molecules (not something I profess to understand) was caused "by electrons from nuclear decay in the early days of evolution". That's chemistry, biology, physics, palaeontology and even astrophysics right there and it affects us all.

There's the point.