That was *your* phrase not mine! I don't know why you introduced it really, but it was just another fact you got wrong.
Natural selection; that was the key insight, the whole point really.
Well there is this; discusses speciation in plants and insects.
If you want a lion to turn into a badger or something, you might have to wait a bit longer.
They believed in a "master race" didn't they? And that other races were genetically inferior or some such thing? I gather that in modern biology there is "no such thing as race"; the genetic variation within a race is greater than that between them. Not that I am a geneticist, but sounds like something that is good to know.
Evolution? Or the science and the enlightenment in general?
In either case, yes, it is.