Similarly people today misappropriate concepts of evolution to Darwin which he could have not possibly understood.
I'm not sure what you are talking about there.
Obviously there are ideas about how evolution and natural selection work on the genome level that Darwin could have known nothing about. It's what's termed the 'modern synthesis' or 'Neodarwinism'. I don't recall anyone putting those ideas about gene expression and whatnot into Darwin's mouth. Instead, it's part of the continued extension and development of the idea of natural selection in light of the last 150 years worth of work in genetics.
This namely because he stands as an icon to atheists for his dispelling of a transient Lutheran principal of static species (which really only came into fashion post- Martin Luther).
I think that you may be overestimating the role of Luther in this.
In my opinion, the reason why traditional religion reacted badly to Darwin are two-fold. First, Darwin treated humans as another species of animal, derived by evolution from earlier animals, and not as a special creation. Humanity was moved into the natural realm and no longer stood separate and apart from it. That's where the earliest criticism of his ideas often arose, against the idea than man had arisen from "monkees".
And second, Darwin's theory kind of emasculated natural theology's design argument. In a way, one can say that Darwin unintentionally created modern atheism. Prior to his day, the design argument seemed almost unanswerable. European intellectuals were forced to hypothesize an initial designer, even while they questioned the special revelations purportedly contained in the Bible. So they often gravitated towards deism. After Darwin, it no longer seemed that the functional adaptation observed in the biological world required an intelligent designer, so intellectuals felt freer to become flat-out atheists.
In 300 years the the 100 difference between our understanding today and our understanding in 1900 will be just as blurry as 1500 and 1600 are today to the average individual.
I think that the twentieth century will be famous for the appearance of molecular genetics. Historians of science 300 years from now will study that development and write books and papers on it.
The idea of animal evolution, however was not. Immanuel Kant wrote 80 years earlier "an orang-outang or a chimpanzee may develop the organs which serve for walking, grasping objects, and speaking-in short, that lie may evolve the structure of man, with an organ for the use of reason, which shall gradually develop itself by social culture". Darwin's own father made claims remarkably similar decades earlier.
It's true that the idea of biological evolution is older than Darwin. Many people had already written about it. (Buffon, Lamarck etc.) Charles Darwin's own ancestor Erasmus Darwin had been an evolutionist. What Charles Darwin and Wallace did was produce a breakthrough theory about how evolution took place, about how it worked. (By natural selection.)
What was NOT novel about Darwin's theory was natural selection and the ability to mutate advantageous traits.
Not novel? It's conceivable that a determined intellectual historian can find examples of people proposing similar ideas even earlier. I pointed to Empedocles in an earlier post. But Darwin and Wallace do seem to have been the first ones who really developed the idea and are the ones who introduced the idea into the mainstream of science.
However, even since 1860 our knowledge of this has far exceeded his relatively simple idea. There's no reason for us to assume it won't be as trivial a fact in 300 years as Newton's -- yes it will be roughly true, though primitive.
I don't think that anyone knowledgeable dismisses Newton's dynamics as "trivial". It probably is true that evolutionary biologists will, in fact already do, have little reason to consult Darwin's texts. They consult more modern texts that incorporate what's been learned in the last 150 years into Darwin's natural selection framework. Modern physicists don't typically consult Newton's 'Principia' either. But that's not a suggestion that Newton or Darwin weren't important, even transformational, figures in the history of science.
