Darwin

 CHARLES DARWIN (1809-1882)

EARLY LIFE

Charles Darwin was born on February 12, 1809 in Shrewsbury England to Robert W. Darwin and Suzanna Wedgwood. Darwin was a bit of a wild child when he was young. He often stole fruit and misbehaved for attention, and he was blamed for naything that happened by his sister. He could be very active and was athletic, being impressively good at running and rock throwing. However, he could also be shy, gullible, and lazy. He was very quiet in school and was a slow learner, so he often didn't enjoy school, and his father removed him from his first three schoools, including Revd Case's Grammar School, Revd Samuel Butler's School, and med school at the University at Edinburgh, due to poor grades. He finished his education studying to be in the clergy at Cambridge.

INTERESTS and INFLUENCE

When Darwin was young, he enjoyed playing in his father's garden. He had an interest in plants, and his mother showed him how to change the color of flowers by putting food dye on them. He enjoyed fishing and collecting things, such as plants, insects, and coins. He had no interest in school, so his father took him out of Revd Case's Grammar School and said that he, "cared for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catching, and you will be a disgracet o yourself and all your family." Although he showed no interest in school at Revd Samuel Butler's School, he did enjoy reading Shakespeare, Byron, Scott, Thompson, and the Odes of Horace. He enjoyed hiking in Northern Whales, where he collected shells, insects, minerals, geological specimens, etc. The idea of travel and exploration was put into his head by reading "Wonders of the World." He learned the methods of scientific experimentation by helping his brother in his homemade chemistry lab, but he was scolded for wasting his time and mocked for his strange interest by his friends, who called him "Gas Darwin." His father removed him from Revd Samuel Butler's School because of his lack of interest and effort, where his teachers said that he posessed no notible abilities. He was then sent to medical school at the University of Edinburgh in 1825. He found most of his classes a waste of time, but he loved his chemistry class. Although he didn't find interest in nost of his classes, he learned outside of class and met many influencing people. He met a man from South Africa, John Edmonstone, who taught him how to stuff animals and told him about the rain forests of Africa, which made him think more about travel and probably lead to the journey on the H.M.S. Beagle. He was inspired to start a field journal, which helped to prepare him more for the Galapagos Isalnds, by Revd Gilbert White's book, "The Natural History of Selborne." He spent a lot of time at the Natural History Museum in Edinburgh where he became friends with the museum curator, William Macgillivray, who taught him about botany and animal anatomy and encouraged him to take notes on his nature observations. At Edinburgh, he joined a science club called the Plinian Society that focused on natural science instead of supernatural science. This is probably where he first was exposed to the evolutionsry theory. He also made an acquaintance with Professer Robert Grant, who he took long walks with discussing marine biology and collecting specimens. Grant told Darwin about the ideas of Lamarck, who Darwin later uses for a basis for his evolutionary theory. Darwin was focusing more on his new friends than he was on his studies, and was removed from the University of Edinburgh. His father next enrolled him in Cambridge to study for the clergy. To everyone's surprise, he actually enjoyed Cambridge, where he was able to study flora and fauna and discuss natural history with clergy men in his free time. He had a girlfriend for a while, a friend of his sister's, Fanny Owen. During their relationship, Darwin was studying beetles, and often chose his studies over Fanny. Their relationship did not last long, due to Darwin's new hobby. His cousin, William Fox, taught him about taxonomy by classifying the beetles. This taught him the important skill of comparing anatomies. He was introduced to Revd John Stevens Henslow by his cousin at a dinner party. Henslow taught him about many different subjects, including botany, chemistry, etimology, geology, mathematics, and mieralogy, and he also taught him to be confident in himself because he had the potential to become a great naturalist. This made him finally decide what he was going to do. He met a man named Professor Adam Sedgwick, who he travelled in Northern Whales with in the summer of 1831 to study geology before his trip to the Galapagos Islands later that year. Darwin was influenced by many people, but the person that had the most influence on his evloutionary theory was Jean Baptiste Lamark, a French Naturalist. Lamark believed in spontaneous generation, that living things could arise from nonliving things, and he believed that organisms inevitably evolve into more complex organisms. He was also influenced by Thomas Malthus. Malthus had the idea that every man in society had to compete for food because as teh population goes up, the food supply goes down. After reading Malthus' book, //Population//, he said, "it at once struck me that under these circumstances favourable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavourable ones to be destroyed. The results of this would be the formation of a new species. Here, then I had at last got a theory by which to work." He thought that organisms evolved by passing on acquired traits on to offspring. His theory is no longer accepted among scientists, but it gave Darwin some ideas. Alfred Russel Wallace was also an influence on Darwin, and Darwin was an influence on him. They both came up with the evolutionary theory at about the same time, but Darwin published it first, giving him all the credit.

JOURNEYS

Darwin's most famous journey was on the H.M.S. Beagle in 1831 to the Galapagos Islands and other places around the world. During his stay in the sparsely inhabited Galapagos islands he was able to study many different variations of organisms, including tortoises and finches. While studying toroises, he discovered that their necks were different lengths in order to be able to reach their food. His most famous observations were whhat he discovered about the finches. He discovered 14 different variations of finches, shown above, all different sizes and with beaks of all different shapes. He realized that their beaks were shaped differently according to the food they eat, for example, the large, short backed one on the left would eat hard shelled nuts that it woud have to crack open, and a finch with a very skinny beak, like the one towards the top, would eat something that lived in a small place that it would need to reach into. Darwin discovered other things outside of the Galapagos Islands by travelling around the world. His course is represented by the black line on the map. He discovered similar structured organisms that lived on completely different continents, such as the ostrich, the emu, and the rhea. We know now that they were separated by continental drift, but Darwin was very curious how animals that obviously shared a common ancestor could end up in different parts of the world. While being in South America and hanging out with the natives there, Darwin became more strongly opposed to slavery and child labor in Europe than he had been before. The Reform Bill of 1832 was passed while he was travelling, and he was in strongly supported it.

THEORIES

While Darwin was on his journey on the H.M.S. Beagle, he began to develop his evolutionary theory.   The theory that he came up with has two parts: decent with modification and natural selection. Decent with modification is another way of saying evolution and states that all species must have descended by reproduction from a preexisting species that must be able to change over time and probably came from the same original common ancestor. Natural selection is how decent with modification works which has four main parts: overproduction, struggle to survive, genetic variation, and differential reproduction. Over production is the idea that more offspring are produced than can be cared for or survive. This is thought as Mother Nature’s way of population control, by giving less food than can feed the population, so that organisms have to compete and there’s a struggle to survive. The struggle for existence is the competition between organisms to be the most fit to the environment, or have the best adaptations, and survive. Genetic variation is that different individuals in a population have different traits and new traits may appear. Differential reproduction is that the organisms in a population with the best fitted traits and adaptations to the environment would be the one to win the struggle to survive. That is Darwin’s famous “survival of the fittest” theory, which is the epitome of modern evolution.

IMPACT

Darwin's Theory of Evolution, published in his book, //Origins of Evolution//, influenced many people, including scientists, the church, and individuals like Herbert Spencer, Adolf Hitler, and Francis Galton. He changed scientific thought, influencing the field of inheritance and starting thoughts for genetics, especially for Gregor Mendel. He greatly affected the church, for he disproved the creationist theory, one of the church's main teachings. This made people start to doubt the teachings of the church, leading Neitzsche to say, "God is dead," and many poets and authors say similar things in their works. Darwin's ideas also influenced Spencer to develop the idea of social darwinism, which is the idea that society is a competition and only the fittest make it to the top. This idea aided Hitler in his theory that Jews were an unfit race and should be allowed to die off, or, in Hitler's mind, be exterminated. Francis Galton, a scientist, was greatly influenced by his half-cousin, Darwin, and he started the human genetics movement, which also greatly changed scientific thought. Therefore, Darwin's theory changed the thoughts of the 19th century, some for the better, like scientific thought, and some for the worse, such as Hitler.

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