The most important thing to know about Darwin these days is that he is not of "these days." His "science" is not modern science. His world shattering book, "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life," was published in 1859, before the civil war in America, before the end of slavery there. This should not be taken to mean that any discovery that old should be dismissed, but only that Darwin's ideas are up for renewal which did not come. The question is whether new discoveries have decreased the relevance of his ideas. The answer is yes, more powerful microscopes revealed the complexity of even the smallest living things.
When in 1676 Anton van Leeuwenhoek first started writing to the Royal Society in London about what he called "animalcules" microscopes were not very powerful. When people saw living things that small and that simple they could believe life itself was simple.
In those times the theory of evolution could easily be mistaken to explain much more than the origin of a longer beak or sharper claw. Many people could believe the theory explained the origin of life itself.
When Mendel's work with heredity showed the transmission of traits it was easy to believe genes were also simple things.
Later improvements in microscope technology have shown that neither life nor heredity is simple. Modern technology re-established the "Paley's Watch" view of life, the view that something as complex as a watch presupposes a watchmaker. "These days" life is known to be exceedingly more complex than mere randomness could assemble. The traits Mendel studied are known to be transmitted by "chromosomes," very large arrays of linked genes. All those arguments about the improbability of a tornado in a junk yard accidentally assembling a working automobile are valid against randomness as the author of much at all.
So many have continued to have difficulty seeing this point this site presents the fair penny example. Suppose the technology existed that could make two pennies, one with a perfectly even chance of landing on heads or tails and one with a slightly higher probability due to its weight distribution and aerodynamics to land on heads. Suppose also that the unfair penny has a 0.50000001 chance of landing on heads. How long would it take a person to determine which penny was which just by tossing the penny and counting the ratio of heads to tails landings? A person could not in one lifetime obtain much certainty at all which penny was which. Similarly nature cannot detect the microscopic differences that arise truly randomly. Nature can only detect major differences which involve complexity beyond the grasp of early believers that Darwin discovered abiogenesis (which he did not claim). The complexity must be constructed without the help of natural selection, outside its "view."
But it will be argued that once complex systems exist it can be possible for tiny random changes to result in markedly better complex systems, in differences nature could detect and select. Although most unlikely, it might be possible. The big problem is that you can't start with a complex system if you are trying to find the origin of life. Complexity from complexity doesn't really explain any "origin." You need an "animalcule" such as people with very low power microscopes thought they did have, something very simple and alive. Then you might proceed explaining things with random mutations and natural selection. But there really isn't any such animalcule.
Just as the hope was dying that animalcules might explain the origin of life, the Miller-Urey experiment in 1952 constructed a few simple amino acids in what might have been "natural," "primordal" Earth conditions. The search for a comprehensive lightning-struck-mud-and-life-began theory revived in earnest. But the more we learn the more we know we need for life to begin; phospholipids, self replicating RNA and so forth, issues that early experiment did not address. That further work doesn't make as much news because the scientists know that they will be accused of making up a new "primordal Earth" to suit any complexity that arises. And because they know the complexity has already outrun any likely primordal Earth. There are a few diehard websites that insist prebiotic steps to life have been completed, but any sensible, educated person knows today, that isn't true. We seem to have proof, insofar as a negative can be proved, that life did not begin when lightning struck mud.
It is a disgrace to public education in America that it clings so hopelessly to such an outdated idea as Darwin's theory of evolution and insists on its exclusive position in the classroom. People had been breeding plants and animals for centuries before Darwin was born. There is even an "evolution" story of sorts in the Bible. See Genesis chapter 30 verse 31 through chapter 31 verse 13. And the notion that the "six days" of creation lasted the same time as we experience it had long been abandoned by organized religion. There was no penalty for believing one way or the other on the duration, no matter of faith at all. Darwin contributed nothing new. All the furor was not because he might explain the origin of species, but because so many thought it might one day explain the origin of life. Although indeed there were those who were uncomfortable believing man descended from apes and chose the Bible explanation for that reason, philosophers realized that too little was known by religion or science for any such discomfort.
It is not the Bible that dismisses Darwin, it is modern science and modern microscope technology! Darwin's theory belongs in an age when few people had indoor plumbing.
Another imposter at the table of science is the so called "Big Bang" as an explanation of the origin of the universe. It is disturbing how many programs on the Public Broadcasting Service about origins have taken such nonsense seriously. It would be funny if it weren't for the detriment to society. It should be obvious to any sane person that the "Big Bang" explains nothing at all. It also violates the first law of thermodynamics that the amount of energy in the universe is constant and can neither be created nor destroyed. There is no evidence to the contrary. There is no known case of energy (or matter) being created or destroyed, only changed in form.
One PBS program said that an alternate theory was the "oscillating universe" theory where gravity finally after centuries starts all matter moving toward some central point where it explodes in another "big bang." A big problem with that theory is that it violates the second law of thermodynamics that every transfer or transformation of energy increases the entropy of the universe. "Entropy" is the measure of randomness. Living things are capable of organizing energy into less randomness. Plants do this by photosynthesis, but this is only possible at the expensive of other energy from the sun. There is no known evidence to the contrary of the second law either.
These laws are not discussed much because it is disturbing to think that the universe is winding down and that in some fixed length of time however long it will be a dead cloud of hot gas unless some force outside it, whatever, wherever or whoever that is, winds it back up.
For centuries just exactly what was going on up in the sky mystified many and was a source of varied speculation, and of course "religious" debate. After Newton published his "three" laws (all which can be expressed by "force equals mass times acceleration") of motion people at last knew how the planets could stay up there. They perhaps assumed they would eventually find out how the planets got into those orbits in the first place. Scientists still do not know today how the planets got into their orbits in the first place.
No. When the laws of motion are applied a planet flying in a line perpendicular to the surface of the sun at the point of departure will either continue in a straight line or fall back in along the same line it left. Some other force has to act on it near its orbit to change its direction into that orbit.
Again this by itself will not result in an orbit.
This graphic shows four different launches all at 45o to the surface of the sun at that point but with different initial velocities. Notice that the path is part of an ellipse that becomes flatter and more horizontal.
Not shown is a launch of 6.175 x 105 m/s that would go far off the screen then reappear and crash at just over 179o, which is approaching an apparent limit of 180o from the launch point.
No orbit is forming.
Now consider the next graphic which shows launches at zeroo, in line with, the surface of the sun and various initial velocites.
This graphic is not animated like the one above. You should have the idea by now.
The slower launches result in more cicular paths than those with higher initial velocities but they are much closer to the surface. There still appears no way to get in a nearly circular orbit at much distance from the sun.
Suppose there was a nearly circular orbit formed and then the sun shrank away from it.
Celestial bodies sometimes have rings like Saturn. A shrinking active star, one with a nuclear reaction that as the fuel runs out it suddenly shifts into another mode at a lower volume, a smaller nuclear reaction or no nuclear reaction for example, could concievably leave material behind to form rings. It is the height of improbability to imagine the scenario that would lead to the formation of a planet in an orbit that way though. Remember you also need to explain the origin of the moons as well.
The "best" answers for the origin of the solar system then would be first of all that some single event formed the solar system. Not the big bang, that is incompatible with the first law of thermodynamics. Rather no one body in the solar system seems directly responsible for the any other, excepting perhaps the rings. Perhaps instead there was a sort of universal "bumper cars" such as we had not imagined before the Hubble Telescope and all that wound down somehow leaving the present solar system.
The second leading candidate is the shrinking sun theory. But it requires special dynamics of sustained self contained nuclear reactions that we have not been able to observe in the Sun. And the Sun is our only practical working model of sustained self contained nuclear reactions.
There really isn't much that can actually be concluded on these particular matters except that it is obvious scientists know too little about the origins of anything; the universe, stars, planets, moons, life and species to dictate any school lessons.
Although it would seem intuitive that such "complexity" as we now know life requires cannot arise unaided, and that a child could see that, some have argued that there is no dialectic in "science" to "prove" it. Some seem incapable or unwilling to apply the dialectic of the second law of thermodynamics to the problem. They offer examples of "order arising from disorder" as though there were exceptions to the law. It has been shown that all those were actually decreases in potential energy and not "order" arising so much as "simplicity," and that is no argument for initiating complex life. If you still have trouble you can try my theory that randomness is an illusion and the accompanying dialectic which hold thats "randomness does not exist" outside conscious free will and all agencies of apparent randomness actually have "characteristics of agency" beyond which there is no event.