| The expression
"survival of the fittest" did not originate from Darwin's work.
Herbert Spencer had already used it in his books about evolutionary
philosophy. Though he later described our common ancestor as "a hairy
quadruped, furnished with a tail and pointed ears," Darwin did not do
so in the famous On the Origin of Species.
"The presence of a body of well-instructed
men, who have not to labor for their daily bread, is important to a degree
which cannot be overestimated; as all high intellectual work is carried on
by them, and on such work material progress of all kinds mainly depends,
not to mention other and higher advantages." (from The Descent of
Man, 1871)
Darwin was born in Shrewsbury. His grandfather
Erasmus Darwin was a scientist, whose ideas on evolution anticipated later
theories. His chief prose work was Zoonomia, or the Laws of Organic Life
(1794-96). Darwin's maternal grandfather was Josiah Wedgewood, wealthy
founder of the famous potteru works. Due his background Darwin was not
expected to work for a living but use his education and talents well.
Darwin's mother died when he was eight years old, and he was brought up by
his sister. In 1827 he started theology studies at Christ's College,
Cambridge. His love to collect plants, insects, and geological specimens
was noted by his botany professor John Stevens Henslow. He arranged for
his talented student a place a on the surveying expedition of HMS Beagle
to Patagonia. Captain Robert FitzRoy needed a naturalist to serve as his
companion and messmate on the tedious trip. Despite objections of his
father, Darwin decided to leave his familiar surroundings.
The voyage took five years from 1831 to 1836.
Darwin had good reasons to doubt the view that fossils were relics of
Noah's Flood and in Cambridge he had participated in discussions about the
"transmutations" of species. Darwin returned with observations
he had made in Teneriffe, the Cape Verde Islands, Brazil, the Galapagos
Islands, and elsewhere. He never set foor abroad again. During the voyage
he had contracted a tropical illness, which made him a semi-invalid for
the rest of his life. By 1846 Darwin had published several works based on
the discoveries of the voyage and he became secretary of the Geological
Society (1838-41).
From 1842 Darwin lived at Down House, Downe. In
1839 he had married his cousin Emma Wedgwood, and when not devoting
himself to scientific studies, he led a life of a country gentleman. In
the 1840s Darwin worked on his observations of the origin of species for
his own use. He began to conclude, although he was deeply anxious about
the direction his mid was taking, that species might share a common
ancestor. When Alfred Russel Wallace, a naturalist living in the East
Indies, sent in 1858 to Darwin his study containing the main ideas of the
theory of natural selection, Darwin arranged his notes, which were
presented to the Linnean Society, on July 1st, 1858. They were read
simultaneously with Wallace's paper, but neither Darwin or Wallace was
present on that occasion.
Darwin's great work, The Origin of Species by
Means of Natural Selection, appeared next year, and was heavily attacked
because it did not support the depiction of creation given in the book of
Genesis. Before Darwin, the French anatomist and botanist Jean-Babtiste de
Lamarck (1744-1829) had stressed the variations in species, and had given
in his books an account of human development that was plainly evolutionary
in spirit. Darwin's argument that natural selection - the mechanism of
evolution - worked automatically, leaving little or no room for divine
guidance or design. All species, he reasoned, produce far too many
offspring for them all to survive, and therefore those with favorable
variations - owing to chance - are selected. "I am actually weary of
telling people that I do not pretend to adduce [direct] evidence of one
species changing into another, but I believe that this view is in the main
correct, because so many phenomena can thus be grouped end
explained."
At Darwin's hands evolution matured into a
well-developed scientific theory, which have been a constant target of
religious or pseudo-scientific attacks. However, Darwin himself did not at
first explicitly apply the evolutionary theory to human beings. "You
ask me whether I shall discuss man," he wrote in 1857, "I think
I shall avoid the whole subject, as so surrounded by prejudice." He
also knew that his challenge to the Biblical doctrine would cause stress
to his friends and family, among them hsi religious wife. T.H. Huxley did
not see any reason to hesitate and published in his Man Place in Nature
(1863) an application of the theory and Darwin followed him in THE DESCENT
OF MAN, AND SELECTION IN RELATION TO SEX (1871) and EXPRESSION OF EMOTIONS
IN MAN AND ANIMALS (1872), which showed the similarities between animals
and man in the expression of emotions and was the start of the science of
ethnology.
The remainder of Darwin's books deal with plants.
In INSECTIVOROUS PLANTS (1875) he explored how a plant - the sundew -
catches, ingests, and digests flies. Darwin's works have had deep a
influence also outside the field of natural sciences, and turned the
scientific lens inward upon the unexplored dimensions of the human
psychology. Freud brought Darwin's study to its logical conclusion in his
explorations of the unconscious mind.
"Believing as I do that man in the distant
future will be a more perfect creature than he is now, it is an
intolerable thought that he and all other sentient beings are doomed to
complete annihilation after such long-continued slow progress. To those
who freely admit the immortality of the human soul, the destruction of our
world will not appear so dreadful."
Darwin's voyage with the Royal Navy's H.M.S.
Beagle is recorded in the JOURNAL OF RESEARCHES (1836), a blend of
scientific reporting and travel writing, one of the best travel books ever
written. Also Alfred Wallace wrote a travel book, The Malay Archipelago.
Darwin died in Down, Kent, on April 19, 1882. It it thought that Darwin
suffered from Chagas's disease, when bitten by a bug during his scientific
studies in South America. This would account for his fainting and other
symptoms.
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