Darwins Dangerous iDea: March 2013

Saturday, March 2, 2013

What Did Charles Darwin Do?

Charles Darwin was an English naturalist. He was born on February 12th 1809 (the same day in fact as the 16th Us President, Abraham Lincoln), educated at Edinburgh and Cambridge Universities, and in the years 1831 to 1835 participated in a five year trip around the world on the Hms Beagle. While Beagle's mission was to gawk and chart coastlines, Darwin amassed a huge range of natural history samples and learning the geology, botany and biology of the areas that the ship visited.

When Darwin returned to England, based in part on the samples he collected, he slowly developed his theory of evolution natural selection. Although the great age of the Earth and even evolutionary ideas (such as the idea that successive generations of organisms turn over time and that one species can transmutate into another) were a commonplace among the scientific community, these ideas had not commonly reached a wider public. This however changed in the 1840s when an anonymously published book (in fact written by the Scottish journalist, Robert Chambers), entitled "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation" introduced the group to these sorts of ideas and caused a storm of controversy.

Although Darwin determined the science in "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation" to be amateurish, he noted the storm of controversy caused by the book. As a result, he held back from publishing his own ideas, which included most crucially an explanation of the mechanism by which evolution occurs ("natural selection"), until he had amassed a mountain of evidence and discussion in keep of his thesis, as well as answers to all the likely objections.

Even then, Darwin held back from publishing, and at last only did so when urged to by his friend, Sir Charles Lyell, who had come to be aware that Alfred Russel Wallace was working on similar lines to Darwin, and concept that Darwin ought to publish to organize priority. Darwin's ideas were first presented in a paper to the Linnean community in a paper on July 1st, 1857 - it was read out by Lyell and Joseph Dalton Hooker, since Darwin was unable to attend due to the recent death of his child son from scarlet fever. Then in 1859, Darwin published one of the most foremost books in the history of science, "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life" (usually referred to as just the "On the Origin of Species").