 The broad sweep of Darwin’s claims, the brevity of the empirical evidence actually supplied in the text, and the implications of his theory for several more general philosophical and theological issues, immediately opened up a controversy over Darwinian evolution that has waxed and waned over more than 150 years. As is well-known, Darwin developed his argument rhetorically with the claims of its explanatory superiority over the doctrine of “special creation”, which he posed as the main alternative to his account. This stylized opposition to “creationism”, rather than to the arguments raised by the traditions of Cuvier, Buffon, and Lyell that demonstratively formed the basis of the scientific opposition to transformism before Darwin (see the entry on  evolutionary thought before Darwin),  was a point of considerable criticism by contemporaries such as Richard Owen, who held no such theory of special creationism (Bowler 2013a). But the rhetorical strategy of opposing his theory to theistic creationism served to define much of the popular debate over Darwin’s theory in the succeeding period, and continues to define it in the present.