Charles Darwin and Natural Selection

Charles Darwin was a naturalist who lived from 1809 to 1882. His life was spent collecting specimens and keeping records of his voyages overseas. His voyage on the H.M.S. Beagle was most noted and it was very important to the theory of evolution. Aboard the H.M.S. Beagle, Darwin was the ship's naturalist and companion to the captain. One of the places the Beagle sailed to was the Galapagos islands off the coast of South America. It was at the Galapagos that Darwin began to formulate his theories of natural selection and evolution. Darwin kept extensive records on his voyage and, after making landfall in Europe, he moved to London to write about his discoveries onboard the Beagle.

As Darwin began to work through his numerous workbooks and other research materials he had collected on his voyage, he began to doubt the prior theories of naturalists such as Lamarck who theorized that species remained unchanged through out time. Darwin's research supported the theory that in fact species do change through time and therefore were meant to be under a process of continual change. As Darwin was coming to the above conclusion he was influenced by the work of Thomas Malthus. Accompanied by Malthus' theory, and his own observations, Darwin began to understand that there were natural processes at work in nature. These natural process could be referred to as the concept of differential survival in terms of fitness. Differential survival meant that a population of organisms, given their reproductive capabilities, will generally tend to exceed the food supply or the carrying capacity of the environment. Thus, favorable variations which aid an individual organism in their survival will have a greater chance at reproductive success than those with less desirable traits.

As the years progressed, Darwin slowly came to the theory of evolution, but was unable to make it a cohesive theory. Alfred Russel Wallace, a friend of Darwin's who worked as a naturalist in Malaysia, sent Darwin his short paper entitled, "On the Tendency of Variations to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type". Wallace's paper had synthesized Darwin's theories ideally. Ironically, where it had taken Darwin 20 years to even reach a conclusion about species variation, it took Wallace only a few moments during a delirious fit of a malaria attack to write a quick theme summary of Darwin's idea. The end result of both Wallace's and Darwin's work was a conflict as to who should publish their papers first, which was later resolved by the Linneas Society of 1858 when both papers shared equal credit. The last published work of Darwin was "On the Origin of Species", published November 24, 1859. Slightly jilted from the experience of Wallace, Darwin felt pressured to write and publish the book, hence, most of the credit of evolutionary thought has been given to Darwin. Darwin concluded in his works the following:

• Natural Selection ultimately produces evolution

• The vast variety of living creatures are a natural outgrowth of the vast ways to live within the environment, or niches that organisms can occupy.

• A species ability to adapt is the essence of evolution.

Conclusion

Darwin's conclusions have since been fine-tuned by many modern scientists along with Mendel. In particular, the work of Watson and Crick, which led to the founding of DNA, the building block of genetics, permitted further plausibility to evolutionary history. However, it is important to note that evolution has since not remained a law within science, it is an ever evolving theory open to interpretation. In particular, evolution as a concept has faced many theological and religious challenges in its acceptance or denouncement. The conflict between whether humans came directly from God or evolved from apes, or nature for that matter, has been epitomized in such cases as the Scopes Monkey Trial and continues to be debated among scientists and creationists through out the world.