Posts Tagged ‘The Origin of Species’

The publication of The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin in 1859 continued the Darwin legacy. Erasmus Darwin, Darwin’s grandfather,  had published the book entitled Zoönomia, or The Laws of Organic Life earlier in 1794. In Zoönomia, Erasmus entertains the basic tenets of evolution and asks the question: 

“Would it be too bold to imagine that all warm-blooded animals have arisen from one living filament, which the great First Cause endued with animality… possessing the faculty of continuing to improve by its own inherent activity, and of delivering down these improvements by generation to its posterity, world without end?”

 As a physician in Lichfield from 1756 to 1781, Erasmus acquired a reputation for being a great healer. He was so successful that King George III asked him to be his doctor, but Erasmus Darwin refused the appointment. Becoming a noted naturalist, writer, poet, and inventor during his own time, Erasmus’ intellectual curiosity eventually led him to be one of the founding members of the Lunar Society. Members of this society were of influence, largely becoming the engine-driving force of the British Industrial Revolution.

 Darwin’s passion to study of nature came into sharper focus during the second year at Edinburgh University. On campus, Darwin became acquainted with Professor Robert Edmund Grant, a proponent of evolution and student of Erasmus Darwin.

 In his doctoral thesis, Grant quoted from Zoönomia. Evolution even at that time was strongly rooted in academic circles. Grant espoused the Lamarckian theory: evolution through acquired characteristics. In his autobiography, Darwin recalls an early conversion with Grant:

 “He one day, when we were walking together he burst forth in high admiration of Lamarck and his views on evolution. I listened without any effect on my mind. Nevertheless it is probable that the hearing rather early in life such views maintained and praised may have favoured my upholding them under a different form in my Origin of Species.”

 In time, Darwin became one of Grant’s keenest students and assisted him with collecting specimens. Grant introduced Darwin to the academic elite of the day, connections that were to become invaluable for his future.

Darwin’s “holy grail” centers on natural selection. Natural selection acts to select new things (variations). The question is, then—how do new variations arise? How does selection produce a species?

 In 1982, the late English paleontologist Colin Patterson, however, placed the origin of variations into perspective: “No one has ever produced a species by the mechanisms of natural selection. No one has ever got near it, and most of the current argument in neo-Darwinism is about this question: how a species originates. And it is there that natural selection seems to be fading out, and chance mechanisms of one sort or another are being invoked.”

 Actually, Darwin agrees: “But we are far too ignorant to speculate on the relative importance of the several known and unknown causes of variation.” Darwin continues: “Our ignorance of the laws of variation is profound. Not in one case out of a hundred can we pretend to assign any reason why this or that part has varied.”

 On a scale of 1 to 10, how closer are we today in answering the question—how do new variations arise?

Darwin

February 12, 1809, on the same day that Abraham Lincoln was born in a log cabin, Darwin was born into aristocracy at the Mount. Since Darwin’s mother died when he was only eight years old, his father sent him to Butler’s boarding school. By his own admission, Darwin considered himself a “below average” student.

 Then at the age of sixteen, Darwin started college at Edinburgh University to become a physician, because that is what his father wanted him to do. But Darwin was repulsed but what he saw. Transferring to Christ’s College at University of Cambridge to become a minister, Darwin developed life-long associations with Professors Henslow and Sedgwick.

 After receiving an offer of a lifetime after graduation following Henslow’s recommendation, Darwain joined the HMS Beagle as a volunteer naturalist. Leaving Plymouth, England in December 1831, the Canary Islands were the first to be explored and while nearly “utterly homesick,” the thirty-five days on Galápagos Islands cumlinated the voyage. While it was Captain FitzRoy Legacy gave Darwin the opportunity of a lifetime, he later deeply regreted the decision, eventually committing suicide.

 Impressions from the voyage eventually paved the way for the publication of The Origin of Species, more than 20 years later. In 1882, in the area of Westminster Abbey known as Scientists’ Corner, Darwin was laid a few feet from the burial place of Sir Isaac Newton and next to that of the astronomer Sir John Herschel.