After a five-year, 40,000-mile voyage on H.M.S. Beagle in which he observed a wide range
of natural phenomena (including an earthquake and volcanoes) and in which he collected
many specimens, Darwin began to realize that the myths in Genesis did not account for the
natural world with its incredible diversity of life.
Just as Darwin and others had observed that the land had undergone great
physical changes Darwin began to suspect that organisms would vary too until new species
arose. These species would not be
independently created but would have descended from other species.
Darwin did not rush to print because he was a careful man. He continued his studies and researches. He contacted experts in many fields to gather
information. He raised objections to his own
ideas.
After 23 years of work, in 1859 he published The Origin of Species in an edition of
1250 copies. The edition sold out that day -
and the book continues to sell well today. The
book has been called 'the most fundamental of all intellectual revolutions in the history
of mankind'.
Darwin and another English naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace had observed that
species vary by location and by time. Today
we describe that process by the term 'evolution' which means the 'change in the hereditary
characteristics of groups of organism over the course of generations'. Given the fact of evolution Darwin searched for a theory of evolution to explain what he had
observed.
Both Darwin and Wallace had read Reverend Thomas R Malthus's essay on
population. Malthus had argued that human
population would be kept in check by limited resources, diseases, and wars, all of which
he lumped into the categories of 'vice' and 'misery'.
Clearly something similar was operating in the natural world and that
something was what Darwin termed 'natural selection'.
Evolution as Darwin saw it rested on six points. First, organisms produce more offspring than can
survive. Anyone who has tramped through the
woods has seen this. Certainly, the annual
winter death toll is testimony to this fact.
Second, the offspring have variability that is slight, but meaningful for
survival. Anyone who has looked at a litter
of puppies or kittens has no doubt been struck by the differences among them. Human siblings also differ from each other.
Third, there is a struggle for existence.
Every animal in the wild is in a continuous race to find enough food and
adequate shelter. Until the advent of modern
civilization we humans were in a similar race (and some in the world still are).
Fourth, those most suited to the conditions in which they live survive and
reproduce. This point is almost axiomatic. Obviously we are all descendants of people who
lived to reproductive age.
Fifth, favorable traits are passed on to offspring.
And finally the mechanism for evolution is natural selection. There is nothing mysterious about natural
selection--it is simply the 'greater reproductive success among particular members of a
species arising from genetically determined characteristics that confer an advantage in a
particular environment'.
It cannot be emphasized enough that there is nothing anti-religious in
Darwin's theory; in fact, evolution is silent about religion. The major Judeo-Christian-Islamic religious
denominations in the U.S. have accepted evolution as the way God works. Creationists sell God short when they insist upon
a 6,000-year-old flat Earth with the Sun traveling around it.
There is an almost religious feeling in Darwin's final sentence: 'There is a grandeur in this view of life, with
its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and
that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from
so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are
being, evolved'.
