Marketing Darwin

I watched a very interesting documentary regarding Darwin's Theory of Evolution. Its focus wasn't so much on Darwin, but rather the men around him that helped his theory gain a foothold into the scientific community which instantly dismissed it due to religious indoctrination and programming.

This relates directly to advertising as Darwin's supporters had to generate interest inside a hostile market. They did this by debating established scholars and discrediting them in such flamboyant ways so that newspapers would report on them and thereby increase the overall coverage about his revolutionary and very controversial theory.

It got me thinking that if Darwin didn't have these ardent supporters engaging in the political stoushes marketing his message to the masses, would his work have been utterly dismissed as it originally was and lost within the annuls of time?

I've always looked at marketing as generating interest into products that couldn't do so for themselves, thereby making them inferior to those that spread by word of mouth. However I can see that I was very much mistaken with that outlook. Perhaps we owe one of the greatest discoveries ever made by man to the advertisers and snake oil salesman?

I feel a little dirty about this realisation.