CHARLES DARWIN
Charles Darwin was born on February 12, 1809, in Shropshire, England, to Suzanna and Robert Darwin. Charles had always been obsessed with nature and science ever since he could fathom it; he used to collect plants, insects, shells, and rocks daily to observe them. One of his fascinations had been specifically with beetles—later in life he used beetles to help represent evolution in his work “The Descent of Man” (3). This work argued that humans had descended alongside chimpanzees and gibbons from a common ancestor, the great African ape, and we all had evolved differently over those millions of years (6). Over the many years in school, he never truly became “good” at it. He used to always be more interested in his naturalist hobbies. Robert Darwin had chosen Charles’s future careers: firstly, he started training as a doctor in Edinburgh which fell through because he could not bear to listen to the screams of the patients in surgery, and secondly, he studied divinity at Cambridge University to become a vicar. Both careers fell through when he got asked to take the role of a botanist on the HMS Beagle; John Henslow, a Botany professor at Cambridge University, had arranged for Darwin to come on this 5-year voyage in 1831.
The HMS Beagle visited South America, Africa, and Australia, and Darwin had made many observations and taken thousands of specimens to send back to England. He collected rocks, fossils, and animals (dead animals unfortunately). During the voyage in 1835, the HMS Beagle stopped at the Galapagos Islands, which were a group of volcanic islands in the Pacific Ocean around 500 miles from South America. He primarily researched the finches, which were small “drabby” looking birds, known as Tiaris obscurus. He discovered that there had been 13 distinct species with distinction in their beaks. He had concluded that all the finches had come from the mainland and were all originally one species. During a storm, the finches had been carried out to all the different islands where they had to adapt to the specific environment to survive. Each island had a different food source, for instance, islands that had primarily fruit had finches with large parrot like beaks, but islands that had mainly insects as the food source had finches with thin beaks (8).
Therefore, Darwin concluded that plants and animals were all well suited for their specific environment and were constantly changing over time to pass on their specific characteristics to their offspring. Darwin’s Theory of Evolution explains how human beings, plants, and animals have come to be and are still changing over time; additionally, natural selection by descent with modification refers to “survival of the fittest.” There are four conditions: firstly, individuals within a population differ, secondly, differences are passed from parent to offspring (minor genetic differences), thirdly, some individuals are more successful in surviving and reproducing than others, lastly, successful individuals succeed because they have successful traits the have inherited and pass them down to their offspring—more individuals in the population will have this trait.
For natural selection to work properly there are two needed factors: there must be abundant variation and there must be an elimination of the weak. The abundant variation must be completely random and the second is necessary for evolution to proceed over time. After this voyage, Darwin had officially chosen his career path, a naturalist. Based off his theories, he wrote the Origin of Species which had the idea that humans were part of nature like every other animal (8).
In the time that Darwin had concluded his ideas, genetics had not been a topic that anyone knew about. He had only seen the physical aspect of natural selection where most of the population adapts to the environment such as the peppered moth, an example of natural selection that many individuals might not have heard of. The majority of peppered moths (dominant trait) used to have a white base color with block splotches along the entire body, and the moths with recessive traits had been fully black. However, when the Industrial revolution had occurred and the air had filled with black smog, the dominant white moths were not able to camouflage into the environment and were dying off by predation while the black moths were surviving. Therefore, the moths that had been able to survive were the recessive black moths which were able to reproduce. Now, the peppered moth’s mainly have a fully black appearance, and very little of the population has that peppered physical appearance (9).
Another popular example of evolution is deer mice, specifically those who live in the Nebraska sandhills. Glaciers that had melted deposited tons of sand producing dunes ontop of what once used to be dark soil. Deer mice dominantly have a dark brown coloring on their fur which increases their camouflage capabilities into their surroundings, and recessively have light brown fur. Once the dunes arrived, the mice with the darker coloring had been eaten by predators and those with the lighter coloring survived. Therefore, over time the coloring of the mice in this environment became lighter to help them survive (5).
Another characteristic of genetics that has had an influence on Natural Selection is the fact regarding mutations. Mutations can give rise to a new species called speciation. These species become majorly different over periods of time from the original species and give rise to more diversity on the earth (8).
Darwin’s work has influenced many different scientists and philosophers. One of those scientists being Alfred Russel Wallace who had been significantly influenced by Darwin in a way that he wanted to come up with his own theory of evolution. He wrote “On the Tendency of Species to Form Varieties; and on the Perpetuation of Varieties and Species by Natural Means of Selection” which had been published in 1858 in the Proceedings of the Linnean Society (1). This writing was basically restating Darwin’s idea of Natural Selection. The profound impact that Natural Selection had on society rearranged how philosophers and scientists think about humanity. According to Daniel Dennett, a contemporary philosopher, says it is “the single best idea anyone has ever had” (11). Charles Darwin had been known as the founder of Evolutionary Biology as well as the Philosophy of Science. Back in the day the universe had a geocentric understanding of the universe where the earth was in the center and all the universe revolved around it. Nicolaus Copernicus developed the heliocentric idea that the sun is in the middle of the revolving planets... the Copernican Revolution change which is a shift in the cosmos (10). Darwin is known as the Copernicus of nature; he took his theories and changed the way that the world was thought to have been created as well as how it is now.
Evolution is a mindless process, so being that there is no consciousness or God behind it. As Nigel Warburton says, it is “impersonal like a machine that works automatically” (11). Darwin had a major shock to the Victorian’s and the individuals of the church who thought his work was the work of the devil. They had held onto the belief that the Book of Genesis read where God created all animals and plants in the world perfectly and how all of them remained the exact same since creation. Their belief is known as typology: which is diversity in the world has been emphasized by invariance where all organisms are created the same and on some level be genetically equal. This defeats the overall idea of evolution because diversity among a population (a group of organisms in a specific place at a specific time) has to exist or else the mechanism of natural selection will not proceed (8). On the other hand, his theories create the assumption that it has become easier to believe that there is no God. Coincidentally, his theories destroyed the Design Argument. This argument says that organisms are designed for a specific purpose due to the fact that they are functionally organized (2).
His influence on modern thought had 4 insights to evolution and the creation of the Philosophy of Biology (7). These insights being, that evolution exists, there is a unique origin of all species, evolution occurs over long periods of time (it is not spontaneous), and evolution occurs through the mechanism of Natural Selection. One of the major points that his work says is that nothing can be predetermined because everything changes overtime. And genetically there can be environmental factors called epigenetics which can help turn specific gene operons on or off with gene expression. This allowed the world to be viewed as being adaptive and conclusively gave rise to biological positivism through Cesare Lombroso... which relates to the fact of how some people are born evil (criminals) and some are born good through influences by the environment on free will (4). Additionally, it had been rumored that Darwin had even made an impact on Karl Marx who read his Origin of Species and helped Marx discover “the law of development of human history.” Overall, Darwin was not a philosopher, but he had major impacts on the world as a whole.
1 “Alfred Russel Wallace.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., https://www.britannica.com/biography/Alfred-Russel-Wallace.
2 Ayala, Francisco J. “Darwin's Greatest Discovery: Design without Designer.” PNAS, National Academy of Sciences, 15 May 2007, https://www.pnas.org/content/104/suppl_1/8567.
3 Beutel, R., Leschen, F. “Charles Darwin, Beetles and Phylogenetics.” Die Naturwissenschaften, U.S. National Library of Medicine, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19760277/.
4 “Biological Positivism and Crime: Dissertation Proposal.” UK Essays, UK Essays, 12 Aug. 2021, https://www.ukessays.com/essays/criminology/biological-positivism-in-the-modern.php.
5 Bradt, Steve. “Mice Living in Sandhills Quickly Evolved Lighter Coloration.” Harvard Gazette, Harvard Gazette, 27 Aug. 2009, https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2009/08/mice-living-in-sand-hills-quickly-evolved-lighter-coloration/.
6 Choi, Charles Q. “Fossil Reveals What Last Common Ancestor of Humans and Apes Looked Liked.” Scientific American, Scientific American, 10 Aug. 2017, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fossil-reveals-what-last-common-ancestor-of-humans-and-apes-looked-liked/.
7 Mayr, Ernst. “Darwin's Influence on Modern Thought.” Scientific American, Scientific American, 24 Nov. 2009, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/darwins-influence-on-modern-thought1/.
8 National Geographic Society. “Natural Selection.” National Geographic Society, 7 Sept. 2019, https://www.nationalgeographic.org/encyclopedia/natural-selection/.
9 “Natural Selection.” Peppered Moths: Natural Selection, https://askabiologist.asu.edu/peppered-moths-game/natural-selection.html.
10 Rabin, Sheila. “Nicolaus Copernicus.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford University, 13 Sept. 2019, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/copernicus/.
11 Warburton, Nigel. “Chapter 25: Unintelligent Design.” A Little History of Philosophy, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2011, pp. 145–151.
