DARWINISM AND THE THEORY OF ORGANIC EVOLUTION

WHO WAS DARWIN?

Charles Robert Darwin was an English Naturalist, born on February 12,1809 in Shrewsbury, England whose Scientific theory of evolution by natural selection became the foundation of modern evolutionary studies. An affable Country gentleman, Darwin at first shocked religious Victorian Society by suggesting that animals and humans shared a common ancestry. However, his non-religious biology appealed to the rising class of professional scientists, and by the time of his death evolutionary imagery had spread through all of science, literature and politics.

DARWIN’S JOURNEY THROUGH EVOLUTIONARY THEORIES:-

The belief that God had created mankind in his own image and likeness were shed by most western scientists until the middle of the 19th century when they thought that all the creatures of the planet had been conceived by a divine force that is until Charles Darwin arrived. Some researchers were already talking about an evolution of the species but the British Naturalist was the first to explain with evidence how evolution might occur by natural selection.

Darwin’s theory radically changed biology offering a new explanation of the origin of Human Beings. It also made him one of the most influential scientists and intellectuals in history but to get there he had to make an extraordinary journey, fighting all the odds before hundreds of experiments and spend 20 years of his life refining all his ideas. In 1831, when Darwin was 22 years old and studying at the University of Cambridge was invited as a Naturalist to a great expedition. He boarded the HMS BEAGLE and spent almost five years travelling several continents starting in South America from which he brought back dozens of life specimens illustrations and fossils. These fossils gave him one of the first clues about evolution, for example observing the remains of a Milodon– a giant animal similar to the sloth. He thought that those similarities were probably not a coincidence, there had to be some kind of link.

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When he stopped at the Galapagos Island, Darwin also observed some giant tortoises which lived in nearby islands but showed unique physical characteristics in each island. In the humid areas where vegetation was abundant the turtles had a short neck and a dome-shaped shell whereas in the islands with a drier environment they had a saddle like shell along neck but he couldn’t explain that difference. Upon his return Darwin spent time observing how animal breeders and guards crossbred animals of species to create new varieties. For that creation to be successful the artificial selection made by man was key. Darwin realized that the natural world probably made the same kind of selection but he couldn’t explain how it happened until he read the work of Thomas Robert Malthus, a British intellectual from the 18th century. In an essay on demography, Malthus said that as the population in Europe was growing at one point it would increase much more than the food supplies available and that would cause a fight for survival. This idea helped Darwin explain how evolution works in nature. There is a struggle for survival in which the strongest individual is not necessarily the survivor instead it’s the one which best adapts to the environment where it lives. If a living being has any trait that helps them to survive it will be more successful at the reproduction. Those which don’t adapt will die without descendants. The creatures with the most success in reproducing, past their traits- their lineage and so on until these variations end up becoming a new species. That’s why the differences between the Galapagos Tortoises were a product of evolution.