A Word on Darwin

James Manni
Section 006

Darwin, like many of us, did not know what to do with his life. The son of a doctor, Charles’ father naturally wanted his son to follow in his footsteps. He worked as an apprentice doctor until he was sent to school in 1825. Darwin, along with his brother, attended University of Edinburgh Medical School. He quickly became sidetracked by a natural history club, and his focus on medicine quickly declined. His father sent him to Cambridge (must be a nice fall back plan) to become an Anglican Parson. He remained there until 1831, when an invitation to be head botanist on the HMS Beagle took Darwin all over the world. It was on this that Darwin’s theory of evolution was born.

While Charles Darwin did not set out to “rock the boat” per say, his theory of evolution would spark debate in the realm of science and philosophy for several generations. After a five year journey around the world aboard the HMS Beagle, Darwin’s great work ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES proved to be his most influential work. While the scientific revolution was taking place, this did not stop many from claiming Darwin had lost his mind. In their defense, Darwin was throwing around pretty radical ideas for the time. By stating that humans had evolved from animals, Darwin was, in a sense, denouncing God. After all it was by God’s own hand that humans were created. However, it seems that science has a funny way of trumping religion. Galileo was confined to his for the remainder of his life due to the fact that his findings that the Earth was round. This went against church doctrine and Galileo was thereby punished. Darwin did not suffer the same fate as his Italian counterpart, but his work directly challenged church teachings

                For many thousands of years humans believed they were on this earth because of divine will. The greater power, whoever that might be, placed all the beings as they were. Darwin theory of evolution stated otherwise. The creatures seen today had evolved very slowly through slight variations in a process called natural selection. Complex organic systems, such as the eye, could not be the way that they are if changes had occurred rapidly. God had no part in this evolution, the only factors being the animal and its environment. Over the next 150 years, science has gone on to prove that evolution is true. Technological advances in the fields of archeology and genetics have allowed scientists to prove that species evolved to adapt to their surroundings. Despite directly refuting the creation story in the Book of Genesis, Darwin did not set out to expel the theory of God. He merely was interested in learning about the way the world worked.

A little more on Darwin

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/darwinism/#FivCorPhiProTod
http://www.biography.com/people/charles-darwin-9266433