After 150 years, Charles Darwin still inspires debates about evolution and the nature of the world. Darwin's ideas were spawned by the Victorian need to ask all about their world and how they fit into the grand task of things. Darwin wanted people to understand that life wasn't fixed, was all the time changing, or evolving as Darwin liked to point out. In the next few paragraphs, I will endeavor to show how the need to ask all helped bring Darwin into prominence with his ideas during the Victorian period.
In the era of Queen Victoria, all was changing. Voyage decreased by days instead of weeks when trains were invented, communications became easier when the telegraph appeared, and people began to be replaced by machines in their workplaces. people had all the time struggled to make a living, but, with the coming of the commercial Revolution, the question became more unavoidable when a whole of the people was inviting into the cities from the countryside. Charles Darwin publishes his ideas and throws science and religious thinking into upheaval, by saying that life had all the time been a struggle for existence, that there was a survival of the fittest, and that the natural world was enduringly changing and evolving. No one had operate over the life enduringly changing, it just happened. If there were no limitations on humans, plants, or animals, then the world would become over-populated, which is why all struggles to survive.
Darwins
From a 21st century standpoint, Darwin's writings are the basis for how our current scientists write and how they gift their theories, and with the use of computers, can frame out any whole of things easily. His theories are also the foundation for current evolutionary system that is taught in classrooms today. He couldn't perhaps have known about genetics or molecular biology, but the basics for it are in his writings. When Darwin presented his ideas in Origin of the Species and The Descent of Man, those ideas must have seemed revolutionary. His presentation seems straightforward, well thought out, seems to be no room for argument, and makes his arguments seem cheap and competent. He shows how he came to these conclusions through careful study, and uses humans as an example of what will happen to Earth in the future, "Even slow-breeding man has doubled in twenty-five years, and at this rate, in less than a thousand years, there would categorically not be standing room for his progeny"
Darwin put all of the ideas together that some others had come up with at the same period in time, and the style of his writing is why people in his day and time suitable him over the others with similar viewpoints. Darwin buries the readers in facts, through careful observation, and the constant flow of data coming from his writing gives him a basis for authority on evolution and its branch matter. Darwin makes it clear he doesn't want to offend anyone, so his tone and prose is cautious, and makes careful generalizations. Darwin also doesn't expect other naturalists in his field, who are experienced and have a fixed point of view, to be convinced by any of his arguments. He seems to have high hopes for younger naturalists in his day and age, he expects the younger naturalists to do away with prejudice in their work in the future, and keep an open mind to all possibilities.
Darwin wants everyone to accept that history is a process, that it causes changes in all life on Earth. If a lifeform doesn't adapt, that lifeform will cease to exist. All life should continue evolving as a way to protect itself falling prey to the next biggest species in the food chain. Darwin says all life is connected, it is complex and interrelated. As a consequent of having to evolve or die, natural option takes place, weeding out the weak from the strong. Darwin also points out that he thinks all has descended from one primordial form, the offspring then migrated somewhere, and then adapted to suit the environment in order to survive. Agreeing to Darwin, the originator only set the laws of nature, he doesn't feel that any one species is special, that species alive currently won't be the same in the future, and that his originator set the clock of the world to let it run without supervision until the end of time.
In The Descent of Man, Darwin gets into how natural option also affects how a species deals with sex and reproduction. He says that since all is connected, all mammalian embryos all look alike because of the fact that they all have the same basic structure, but the unlikeness is unavoidable muscles that quadrupeds have that humans don't have. Darwin says man is descended from primates, which is descended from a random marsupial, and the line goes all the way back to all on Earth being descended from an aquatic type of animal species. Courtship rituals are mentioned by Darwin, how the males are regularly the most active in the rituals, and both sexes tend to prefer unavoidable characteristics through separate generations. This is where he makes lots of generalizations, but, since he only knew what he knew from what he saw, he could only write the idea from what he saw from personal experience. Darwin hopes that there is a purpose to all the courtship rituals; otherwise it would all be thoroughly pointless gestures. At the end of his essay, Darwin says this about mankind, "Man still bears in his corporal frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin."
In conclusion, Charles Darwin was very much a stock of the Victorian Age. He was interested in knowing all there was to know about the world nearby him, which is why we study his works to this day. He challenged approved thinking and without those kind of challenges, the world now would be a much separate place.
Darwin and the Victorian Age
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