The Origin of Species

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Widely regarded as a Keystone for evolutionary theories, on the origin of species by British naturalist Charles Robert Darwin, has influenced modern Western society and thought. Br>darwin’s bold theory initially shocked religious Victorian society by its audacious suggestion that animals and humans shared a common ancestry. His nonreligious Biology found a following in the emerging Class of scientists. Formulated in 1837-39 post his famous voyage around the world aboard HMS Beagle where as a naturalist, he kept collecting data in support of his theory, he published this in 1859. On the origin of species is an “abstract” of natural selection centered on the principles of evolution, natural selection, mutation and variation. Its premise is that plants and animals produce more numbers than can be sustained in each generation. These numbers vary in characteristics that are both physical and behaviour and these are passed on to the next generation. Those who adapt to their changing environments are likely to survive, what remains essentially, a numbers game. The book also covers in great detail, the intellectual, social and religious cross-currents that Darwin had to navigate to develop and propagate his theory as well as the challenges to the acceptance of his work posed by his peers and critics. Br>darwin’s work has become a foundational text of the sciences and he was accorded the ultimate british honour – that of a burial in westminster Abbey, London.

CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN was born in 1809 in Shrewsbury, England, to a wealthy intellectual family, his grandfather being the famous physician Erasmus Darwin. At Cambridge University he formed a friendship with J. S. Henslow, a professor of botany, and that association, along with his enthusiasm for collecting beetles, led to ?a burning zeal,? as he wrote in his Autobiography, for the natural sciences. When Henslow obtained for him the post of naturalist on H.M.S. Beagle, the course of his life was fixed. The five-year-long voyage to the Southern Hemisphere between 1831 and 1836 would lay the foundation for his ideas about evolution and natural selection. Upon his return Darwin lived in London before retiring to his residence at Down, a secluded village in Kent. For the next forty years he conducted his research there and wrote the works that would change human understanding forever. Knowing of the resistance from the orthodox scientific and religious communities, Darwin published The Origin of Species in 1859 only when another naturalist, Alfred Russel Wallace, independently reached the same conclusions. His other works include The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871) and Recollections of My Mind and Character, also titled Autobiography (1887). Charles Darwin?s Diary of the Voyage of the H.M.S. Beagle was published posthumously in 1933. Darwin died in 1882; he is buried in Westminster Abbey.

Charles Darwin

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