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CharlesDarwin

1809-1882

"I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term Natural Selection."

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In 1831, the young Charles Robert Darwin set sail from England on what was to prove the most consequential voyage in the history of biology. Not yet 23, Darwin had already abandoned a proposed career in medicine-he described himself as fleeing a surgical theater in which an operation was being performed on an unanesthetized child-and was a reluctant candidate for the clergy, a profession deemed suitable for the younger son of an English gentleman. An indifferent student, Darwin was an ardent hunter and horseman, a collector of beetles, mollusks, and shells, and an amateur botanist and geologist. When the captain of the surveying ship H.M.S. Beagle, himself only a little older than Darwin offered passage for a young gentleman who would volunteer to go without pay, Darwin eagerly seized this opportunity to pursue his interest in nature history. The voyage, which lasted five years, shaped the course of Darwin's future work. He returned to an inherited fortune, an estate in the English countryside, and a lifetime of independent work and study that radically changed our view of life and of our place in the living world. 

Galapagos archipelago: When Charles Darwin visited the Galapagos archipelago, he found that each major island had its own variety of tortoise, so distinct from the others that it was easily recognized by local sailors and fishermen.  The Galapagos consists of 13 volcanic islands that pushed up from the sea more than a million years ago. The major vegetation is thornbush and cactus, and original black basaltic lava is often visible, as it is beneath the lumbering feet of this tortoise on Hood Island-"what we might imagine the cultivate parts of the Infernal regions to be," young Darwin wrote in his diary. 

Evolution Theory:  That Darwin was the founder of the modern theory of evolution is well known. Although he was not the first to propose that organisms evolve-or change-through time, he was the first to amass a large body of supporting evidence and the first to propose a valid mechanism by which evolution might occur. 

Natural Selection:  Natural selection, according to Darwin, was a process analogous to the type of selection exercised by breeders of cattle, horses, or dogs. In artificial selection, we humans choose individual specimens of plants or animals for breeding on the basis of characteristics that seem to us desirable. In natural selection, the environment takes the place of human choice. As individuals with certain hereditary characteristics survive and reproduce and individuals with other hereditary characteristics are eliminated, the population will slowly change. If some horses were swifter than others, for example, these individuals would be more likely to escape predators and survive, and their progeny, in turn, might be swifter, and so on. 

The Origin of Species:  The Origin of Species, which Darwin pondered for more than 20 years after return to England, is, in his own words, "one long argument."  Fact after fact, observation after observation, culled from the most remote Pacific island to a neighbor's pasture, is recorded, analyzed, and commented upon. Every objection is weighed, anticipated, and countered. The Origin of Species was published on November 24, 1859, and the Western world has not been the same since.