Charles Darwin's Theory Of Evolution By Natural Selection

In our modern times, scientists and thinkers are not spoken about as much as they should be, especially considering how much of our lives and our ways of thinking. No other theory affected the world as much as Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. One of the leading evolutionary biologists, Ernst Mayr, wrote about Darwin that “almost every component in modern man’s belief system is somehow affected by Darwinian principles,”

Charles Darwin is known for giving us the idea of evolution through natural selection, how an organism changes over time from changes in heritable physical or behavioral traits (Than). Darwin theorized how these changes allowed creatures to better adapt to their environments, helping them survive and

However, it has multiple ways of achieving this, including gene flow, sexual selection, mutations, and genetic drift (Than).

Long before Darwin’s theories, humans have always sought to explain natural phenomena using stories and religions. An individual could convince a group of anything, embodied by the most prevalent of examples, the Christian Biblical story of creationism. This was the belief that Earth was created two thousand years ago.

These beliefs began to change a small amount around the turn of the nineteenth century, the idea of Natural Theology gained attention, these were modern Christian ideas that “acknowledged the importance of natural processes but still retained the idea of a creator.” This described God as a clock-maker, who “sets the exquisite machinery of nature into action,”

Before Darwin, people didn’t think about biology when they thought of themselves, they thought of being human as represented by the mind, will, morality, sprit, nature of the soul (Burdett).

It was during this time that a young man named Charles Darwin was coming of age. Darwin was born in 1809 to two well off families (Darwin), he had a history of successful physicians on his father’s side. He was expected to follow his father’s steps, but he found the studies too dull and the surgeries too horrid (Darwin). He then went on to Cambridge to study for the ministry, per his father’s advice (Darwin), but he found he was much more interested in his science classes. He graduated in 1831, after three years of study, with a B.A. after a study of a broad spectrum of sciences (Darwin).

After graduating, John Stevens Henslow, Darwin’s Botany professor, unexpectedly arranged for Darwin to join the expedition of H.M.S. Beagle as a naturalist on a long voyage of exploration, despite having no prior experience in the field (Darwin). Darwin left London on the twenty-seventh of December 1831, at the age of twenty-two, for a five-year journey, that was “a passage of consequence for the whole world,”