Only certain members of a species reproduce, by natural selection, and pass along their characteristics. Variation deals with the environment and adaptation to it. His theory of evolution flew directly in the face of most religious beliefs, and upset many scholars who were not necessarily ready to make the intellectual connection between humans and animals.
Charles Darwin was a kind and pleasant man, and suffered from intestinal illness and chronic fatigue all his life, possibly from Chagas Disease which he contracted while in South America.
Darwin wrote a few follow-up books that further outlined his studies and his theories. He continued to publish various essays and books on all aspects of evolution, after spending many years studying various species and drawing conclusions from them to support his ideas.
The incredible evidence he collected to support his logic is still with us today, and is still debated by scientists, zoologists, geologists, and even sociologists the world over. He died in April of and is buried in Westminster Abbey. His words, however, will live on forever with Charles Darwin quotes. All rights reserved. Cambridge University is hosting a five-day festival in July.
Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History established an "Evolution Trail" that highlights concepts from Darwin's work throughout the museum, and a special exhibit shows how orchids have evolved and adapted according to Darwin's theory. As towering historical figures go, Charles Darwin does not provide much by way of posthumous scandals. The liberty-extolling Thomas Jefferson was slave master to his longtime mistress, Sally Hemings; Albert Einstein had his adulterous affairs and shockingly remote parenting style; James Watson and Francis Crick minimized their debt to colleague Rosalind Franklin's crucial DNA data.
But Darwin, who wrote more than a dozen scientific books, an autobiography and thousands of letters, notebooks, logs and other informal writings, seems to have loved his ten children three of whom did not survive childhood , been faithful to his wife, done his own work and given fair, if not exuberant, credit to his competitors. He was born in Shrewsbury, England, on February 12, , into a well-off family of doctors and industrialists.
But his up-bringing wasn't entirely conventional. His family was active in progressive causes, including the antislavery movement. Indeed, an illuminating new book by Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin's Sacred Cause , concludes that Darwin's interest in evolution can be traced to his, and his family's, hatred of slavery: Darwin's work proved the error of the idea that the human races were fundamentally different.
Both of his grandfathers were famous for unorthodox thinking, and Darwin's mother and physician father followed in those footsteps. Darwin's paternal grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, was a physician and natural philosopher of vast appetites—and correspondingly corpulent physique—who developed his own early theory of evolution. It was more purely conceptual than Charles' and missed the idea of natural selection.
On his mother's side, Darwin's grandfather was the wealthy Josiah Wedgwood, founder of the eponymous pottery concern and a prominent abolitionist.
Darwin began training to be a physician but didn't have a taste for doctoring, so he moved on to studying for the Anglican priesthood at Cambridge. His real passion, however, was natural history. Shortly after graduation in , he signed on for an unpaid position as a naturalist aboard the Beagle , which was about to embark on a survey of South American coastlines. During the five-year voyage Darwin collected thousands of important specimens, discovered new species both living and extinct and immersed himself in biogeography—the study of where particular species live, and why.
Upon his return to England in , Darwin stayed busy, publishing scientific works on the geology of South America, the formation of coral reefs and the animals encountered during his Beagle expedition, as well as a best-selling popular account of his time aboard the ship.
He married his cousin, Emma Wedgwood, in , and by the growing Darwin family was established at Down House, in a London suburb. Charles, plagued by poor health, settled down with a vengeance. By , he was confiding in a letter to a fellow naturalist, "I am almost convinced quite contrary to opinion I started with that species are not it is like confessing a murder immutable. He devoted eight full years to documenting minute anatomical variations in barnacles.
A prolific letter writer, he sought samples, information and scientific advice from correspondents around the world. It was a young naturalist and professional specimen collector named Alfred Russel Wallace who finally spurred Darwin to publish. Working first in the Amazon and then in the Malay Archipelago, Wallace had developed an evolution theory similar to Darwin's but not as fully substantiated.
When, in , Wallace sent the older man a manuscript describing his theory of evolution, Darwin realized that Wallace could beat him into print. Darwin had an essay he had written in and Wallace's manuscript read at a meeting of the Linnean Society in London on July 1, , and published together later that summer. Wallace, then on an island in what is now Indonesia, wouldn't find out about the joint publication until October.
Carroll, a biologist and author of books on evolution. He was honored that his work was considered worthy" to be included alongside that of Darwin, whom he greatly admired. This first public airing of Darwinian evolution caused almost no stir whatsoever. But when Darwin published his ideas in book form the following year, the reaction was quite different. On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life soon sold out its first press run of 1, copies, and within a year some 4, copies were in circulation.
Allies applauded it as a brilliant unifying breakthrough; scientific rivals called attention to the gaps in his evidence, including what would come to be known as "missing links" in the fossil record; and prominent clergymen, politicians and others condemned the work and its far-reaching implications. I had inadvertently cut the branch of an overhanging manzanillo tree, whose apples are poison to humans but beloved by tortoises.
The sting from the sap was almost unbearable, and dousing my eyes with water did nothing to help. For the next seven hours I was nearly blinded and could open my eyes for only a few seconds at a time. As I walked back to our campsite, five hours away, I often had to balance, with my eyes shut, on huge boulders in a dry riverbed, and on the edge of lava ravines.
Those were the most painful seven hours I have ever spent. Legend has it that Darwin was converted to the theory of evolution, eureka-like, during his visit to the islands. How could he not have been? In retrospect, the evidence for evolution seems so compelling. I owe this historical insight to a curious fact—Darwin was a lousy speller. We know, moreover, from the complete record of his unpublished scientific notes that he was personally dubious about evolution.
According to creationist theory, species were a bit like elastic bands. He and his servant did take back to England, as pets, two baby tortoises. Those juvenile tortoises further misled Darwin, because differences among subspecies are evident only in adults.
Not realizing the importance of tortoises for the theory he would eventually develop about the origins and diversity of living things, Darwin and his fellow shipmates ate their way through 48 adult tortoise specimens and threw their shells overboard. They have become one of the most famous cases of species adapting to different ecological niches. For example, Darwin thought the cactus finch, whose long, probing beak is specialized for obtaining nectar from cactus flowers and dodging cactus spines , might be related to birds with long, pointed bills, such as meadowlarks and orioles.
He also mistook the warbler finch for a wren. Not realizing that all of the finches were closely related, Darwin had no reason to suppose that they had evolved from a common ancestor, or that they differed from one island to another. One of my most unexpected discoveries in the Darwin archives was the piece of paper on which Darwin recorded his crucial meeting with Gould. Stunned by the realization that evolving varieties could break the supposedly fixed barrier that, according to creationism, prevents new species from forming, he quickly sought to rectify his previous collecting oversights by requesting island locality information from the carefully labeled collections of three Beagle shipmates.
The birth of the Darwinian revolution was a highly collaborative enterprise. Francis Galton was an English explorer and anthropologist best known for his research in eugenics and human intelligence.
He was the first to study the effects of human selective mating. Charles Henry Turner, a zoologist and scholar, was the first person to discover that insects can hear and alter behavior based on previous experience. Thomson was a Nobel Prize-winning physicist whose research led to the discovery of electrons. Albert Einstein was a physicist who developed the general theory of relativity.
He is considered one of the most influential scientists of the 20th century. Francis Bacon was an English Renaissance statesman and philosopher, best known for his promotion of the scientific method. James C. Maxwell was a 19th-century pioneer in chemistry and physics who articulated the idea of electromagnetism.
Mary Leakey was a British paleoanthropologist who, along with husband Louis, made several prominent scientific discoveries. Charles Babbage was known for his contributions to the first mechanical computers, which laid the groundwork for more complex future designs. Charles Darwin was a British naturalist who developed a theory of evolution based on natural selection.
0コメント