Science for Thought

Darwin

Science for Thought

A/N This is the third book in the series that included 'The Theory of Nothing' the "The Universe Revealed.' My purpose in this new book is to more fully explain how science is actually done and how science fits into our culture along with religion and philosophy.

All rights reserved - Copyright © 2017 - The facts are as true as I can make them, but the opinions and conclusions are mine. No disparity or offense is intended to anyone or anything, including any religion or belief system.

Darwin

This is in my opinion one of the most important discoveries ever made because it changed everything about the way we think of the natural world.

Charles Robert Darwin was born on February 12, 1809 as the fifth child of a wealthy society doctor and financier, Robert Darwin. He was a Unitarian and attended the University of Edinburgh Medical School. While there he learned taxidermy and joined the Plinian Society, a natural history group. Natural history in those days was what they called a biologist or a botanist. He assisted Robert Edmond Grant in his investigation of the life cycle of marine invertebrates. This is where he heard of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck's ideas about evolution. So, we can see that he was not unfamiliar with the concept before his famous voyage. However, he did study to be an Anglian country parson at Christ's College, Cambridge, but he didn't like the idea. He wanted to be a natural historian. At that time he studied Paley's Natural Theology and Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, which proposed a God that worked through nature. He also read John Herschel's book, Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy, which describes the concept of basing an understanding of the laws of nature on observation. This establishes that he knew about the concept of evolution and the idea of using observations to actually formulate theories about nature and how it works. In other words, he knew what he was doing.

The fateful 2nd voyage on the HMS Beagle occurred from December 27, 1831 to October 2, 1836. The captain's, Robert FitzRoy, main job was to do a hydrographic survey of the southern part of South America so he had Francis Beaufort as his Hydrographer, who as a gentleman of science wanted a naturalist on board, if no other reason than to revive British science policy. Darwin, at that time, was considered an experienced naturalist.

However, geology was Darwin's main interest, not biology. It wasn't until September 15, 1835 that his work that would become legend happened.

There are 21 islands in The Galapagos chain, which lies 973 kilometers to the West of Ecuador in the Pacific Ocean. The Humboldt Current brings cold water to these islands and it creates different weather conditions on each island. These islands were formed from volcanoes.

So, what did he see that made him think of evolution as being the driving force for the origin of species? That's where careful observations and detailed drawings come into play. What he saw was that mocking birds and finches were different on each of the islands of the Galapagos chain. The differences were in the detail, such as different shapes of beaks, which would be important for eating specific food. This led him eventually to determine that transmutation of species had occurred. This is what they called evolution back then. What this means is that Darwin could plainly see that the birds he had observed were different on each island because they had adapted or had been modified to survive in the different environmental conditions on these islands. It was the only conclusion that made sense. He termed these adaptations as being natural selection. In other words, environmental conditions caused the differences by forcing the species to adapt.

Darwin knew that these small steps of change in a species didn't happen quickly, but took time, occurring in small genetic modifications. The idea here is that a species adapts to a new environment and passes this change to its offspring. Those that don't adapt die off. This would be something like forming wings to escape a new predator.

This is a species relationship diagram from Darwin's notebook.

One must keep in mind that the concepts of the molecular structure of genes and DNA were not yet part of science back then. What Darwin saw was that the plants and animals on the Galapagos islands were distinctly different than those on the American continent, and he could see how these different species were related by branching, which he described and diagramed.

This is an example of Darwin's drawings.
His book 'The Origin of Species' or the full title 'On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection', wasn't published until November 24, 1859, a long time after his Beagle voyage. I'm sure he realized the controversy with his idea about evolution in a time when religion dictated that God created all species in their present form. Religious leaders would eventually vilify him, but scientists would respect his audacity and his scientific expertise.

The truths to take from all of this are that Darwin was not the first person to propose evolution and he was fully aware of the problem connected with it. His contribution was that he made it popular by showing evidence to back it up. His detailed drawings and notes provided the proof that evolution was responsible for the species that we see.

As I've said before, my belief is that God used evolution to create all life, including us.

Thanks for reading.