Darwin the Explorer and Scholar

Biological Evolution and Early Human Evidence ANTH 2301 Darwin the Explorer and Scholar Charles Darwin chose to study theology at Christ's College, Cambridge, after leaving the University of Edinburgh. After completing his studies there, he was hired in 1831 to serve as a naturalist on the HMS Beagle for a five-year global scientific trip. Darwin gathered, dissected, and arranged a variety of specimens during this expedition, particularly at the Galápagos Islands, a group of islands off the coast of western South America. His discoveries on the Galápagos Islands represented a turning point in his evolutionary theory. He remarked that while the fauna and flora of the western coast of South America resembled what he saw in the Galápagos, they were nevertheless enough diverse to be classified as unique species. Even more unexpectedly, there were minor differences between the creatures on each of the different islands in the Galápagos group. Darwin noted thirteen distinct species of finches on thirteen separate little islands. The beak structures, body shapes, and feather colours of the birds varied from island to island. Every species was uniquely suited to the unique environments found on every island. Darwin preserved the Galápagos finches using the methods Edmonstone had taught him, and these birds later provided important sources of proof for Darwin's theory of natural selection. Darwin had been contemplating artificial selection during his Beagle voyage. Artificial selection is the selective breeding of animals to generate features that humans deem beneficial and is typically connected to the process of domestication. Darwin realised that significant hints on the organic development of species may be gleaned via artificial selection. An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), written by English economist Thomas Robert Malthus, was one of the books that Darwin studied when he was travelling aboard the HMS Beagle. This book made two significant discoveries for Darwin. The first was that the human population will rise exponentially if left unchecked. They will therefore double with each generation. The second thing to note was that food supplies grow far more slowly than population growth. Malthus observed that a finite supply of food resources limits the increase of human populations and leads to a battle for survival. Getting enough food is only one aspect of the battle for existence; another is survival. Stated differently, it concerns a person's capacity to obtain sufficient sustenance while avoiding becoming a food source for another creature. The fight for existence is a basic notion that gave Darwin a method for explaining how evolution might take place. Darwin came to the realisation that people with traits that make them more suited to their surroundings are the ones who will make it to adulthood and procreate, while those with less suited variants will not. The idea of natural selection describes this process of "selecting for" particular attributes and characteristics. Darwin deduced from his findings that individuals within a species give rise to distinct species when they are separated by geological features. The underlying ideas of this evolutionary process, known as allopatric speciation (or geographic speciation), are that related species have a common ancestor and that species undergo evolutionary change over time. The concept of evolution was not created by Darwin. Several of the concepts that Darwin employed in his theory of natural selection were created by other intellectuals. Furthermore, Darwin was not the only one to consider natural selection. Approximately contemporaneously, and completely unrelated to Darwin, the same concept was proposed by another British natural historian, Alfred Russel Wallace. Wallace's thinking was impacted by his personal journeys across the Malay Archipelago, which connects Indochina and Australia, whereas Darwin derived his theories from his observations during his trips to the Galápagos Islands. Wallace wrote a letter to Darwin when he was in Malaysia outlining his hypothesis of evolution by natural selection. Wallace and Darwin jointly delivered papers explaining the idea of natural selection because Darwin had not yet published his own research. About 20 years after his HMS Beagle journey, Darwin eventually published his book On the Origin of Species in 1859.