Nearly all informed evolutionists will admit that without billions of years their theory is dead.
Evolution can be surprisingly fast, and probably all the diversity that we see in the species today can probably take place in a few tens of millions of years.
The longer times for evolution are not because it is necessary, but because we see in the fossil record that it actually took hundreds of millions of years to produce the diversity we see today, not because it is necessary. It simply turns out that in real life, the morphology of a species is static for a long period of time. If it wasn't for these periods of stasis, evolution would proceed quite quickly.
The age of the earth is an observational fact, not a requirement in which to fit the evolution of the species.
"The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but the one who causes the darkness."
Clearly, he had his own strange way of judging things. I suspect that he acquired it from the Gospels. -- Victor Hugo