In the 19th century, deists, who championed the watchmaker analogy, held that Darwin's theory fit with "the principle of uniformitarianism—the idea that all processes in the world occur now as they have in the past" and that deistic evolution "provided an explanatory framework for understanding species variation in a mechanical universe."
No século XIX, os deístas, que defendían a analoxía do reloxeiro, mantiñan que a teoría de Darwin concordaba co "principio do uniformismo, a idea de que todos os procesos no mundo ocorren agora igual que ocorreron no pasado" e que a evolución deísta "proporcionou unha armazón explicativa para entender a variación das especies nun universo mecánico."