Author Wan Yu
Charles Robert Darwin, a British naturalist, geologist and biologist, is a textbook classic whose most famous contribution to scientists is the theory of evolution. He proposed that all living species multiplied over time from a common ancestor, and in a joint publication with Alfred Russell Wallace, introduced his scientific theory that this pattern of evolution was produced by a process he called natural selection.
Darwin's early interest in nature led him to neglect his medical education at the University of Edinburgh, and his five-year sailing experience on the Royal Navy's Beagle made him a distinguished geologist.
The Beagle's round-the-world journey
Puzzled by the geographical distribution of wild animals and fossils collected during his voyage, Darwin began a detailed investigation, and in 1838 he conceived his own theory of natural selection. Although he discussed his ideas with several naturalists, he needed time to conduct extensive research. In a letter to Alfred Russell Wallace in 1858, he described the same idea as the other, prompting the two of them to jointly publish this new theory. Darwin's work established the origins of evolution and modified it into the main scientific explanation of the diversity of nature. In 1871, he examined human evolution and the sex selection of human descendants, as well as sex-related choices, followed by The Emotions of Man and Animals. His research on plants has been published in a series of books, and in his last book, The Formation of Vegetable Molds by the Action of Worms, he studied earthworms and their effects on the soil
Darwin in childhood
Charles Robert Darwin was born on 12 February 1809 in Shrewsbury, Shropshire, into a family of monotheists. In 1817, at the age of eight, Charles joined the day school run by evangelists, and he had become interested in natural history and collecting. In July of that year, his mother died. In September 1818, he boarded with his brother Erasmus at the nearby Anglican School of Shrewsbury
Darwin in his youth
In the summer of 1825 Darwin worked as a trainee physician to help his father treat the poor in Shropshire, and in October 1825 he entered the University of Edinburgh Medical School (then the best medical school in England) with his brother Erasmus. Darwin found the lectures boring and the surgeries painful, and apparently he didn't have much interest in medicine.
In his second year at darwin University, he joined the Plinian Society, a student natural history group, in which radical democratic students challenged orthodox scientific religious notions with a materialist perspective. He assisted Robert Edmond Grant in his study of the anatomy and life cycle of marine invertebrates in the Firth of forth, and on March 27, 1827, in Plinian, he made his discovery that the black spores found in oyster shells were eggs of skating leeches. One day, Grant praised Lamarck's evolutionary ideas. Darwin was surprised by Grant's bold demeanor, but he recently read a similar point in the diary of his grandfather Erasmus. Robert Jameson's natural history course covers geology, which includes a debate between Neptune and Pluto, which bored Darwin. He studied the classification of plants and assisted in the collection of the University Museum, which at the time was one of the largest museums in Europe.
Darwin was passionate about insect collecting
Darwin's neglect of medical research annoyed his father, who shrewdly sent him to Christ College, Cambridge, to pursue a Bachelor of Arts degree, a first step toward becoming an Anglican country priest. Since Darwin was not eligible for tripos examinations, he enrolled in a general degree program in January 1828. He prefers horseback riding and shooting to learning. His cousin William Darwin Fox introduced him to the popular beetle collection craze. Darwin was eager to pursue this and published some of his discoveries in James Francis Stephens' Illustration of English Entomology. He became a close friend and follower of Botany Professor John Stevens Henslow.
Darwin had to stay in Cambridge until June 1831. He studied Paley's Natural Theology or Evidence of god's existence and attributes, which argues for the design of divinity in nature, explaining that adaptation is god's action through the laws of nature. He read John Herschel's new book, A Preliminary Treatise on the Study of Natural Philosophy, which describes the highest goal of natural philosophy, namely to understand such laws through observation-based inductive reasoning, and Alexander von Humboldt's personal narrative of a scientific trip of 1799 in 1804. Inspired by "zealous enthusiasm", Darwin planned to visit Tenerife with some of his classmates after graduation to study the natural history of the tropics.
Darwin and the Beagle
Darwin returned home on August 29 after a week with fellow student friends in Barmouth and found a letter from Henslow proposing him to be a suitable naturalist. The ship will set sail in four weeks for an expedition to the South American coastline. Darwin the Elder objected to his son's two-year voyage as a pure waste of time, but his brother-in-law Josiah Wedgwood II persuaded him, agreed and funded him.
The voyage began on December 27, 1831, and it lasted for almost five years. As Fitzroy intended, Darwin spent most of his time surveying geology and collecting natural history, while the Beagle surveyed and mapped the coast. He carefully recorded his observations and theoretical speculations, and occasionally sent specimens to Cambridge along with letters including his family diary during the voyage. He has some expertise in geology, the collection of beetles and the dissection of marine invertebrates, but is new to all other fields and has carefully collected specimens for expert evaluation. Despite suffering from seasickness, Darwin wrote a large number of notes on the ship.
Manuscripts in the direction of evolution
Darwin's research was valued by the famous scholar Lyell
Darwin made his first stop ashore at St. Gago, Cape Verde, when he found a white band on the volcanic rock cliff, which included shells. Fitzroy gave him the first volume of Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology, a book that expounded the unifying concept of land rising or falling slowly over a long period of time, and Darwin also saw Lyle's views, theories, and reflections on the writing of geological works.
Darwin's collection, artifacts
When they arrived in Brazil, Darwin was pleased with the rainforest and the investigation continued in southern Patagonia. They stopped in Baj blanca, and on a cliff near Punta Alta, Darwin found a large number of fossilized mammals next to modern sea shells, suggesting that the recent extinction showed no signs of climate change or disaster. He identified the little-known behemoth with a tooth and its connection to the bony armor, which at first seemed to him like a huge version of a local armadillo. These findings caused great repercussions when they reached Britain.
Together with Gaucho, Darwin went inland to explore geology and collect more fossils, learning about the indigenous and colonial peoples of the Revolutionary period from a social, political and anthropological perspective. Farther south, he saw stepped plains of pebbles and shells, with high beaches showing a range of elevations. He read Lyell's second volume and accepted his view of the "creative center" of species, but his findings and theories challenged Lyell's view of the steady continuity and extinction of species
On the first Voyage of the Beagle, three Fudges were captured and subsequently received a year of missionary education in England. Darwin found them friendly and civilized, but in Tierra del Fuego he encountered "miserable, depraved barbarians" who were very different from domesticated animals (sic). He remained convinced that, despite this diversity, all humanity was associated with a common origin and potential to develop towards civilization. Unlike his scientist friends, he now believes there is no insurmountable gulf between humans and animals.
Tierra del Fuego
Darwin experienced an earthquake in Chile and saw signs that land had just risen, including mussel beds stranded above high tide. High in the Andes, he saw sea shells and some fossil trees growing on the beach. He believes that as the land rises, the ocean islands sink and the surrounding coral reefs gradually form atolls
Darwin reached the Galapagos Islands
On the Galapagos Islands, Darwin sought evidence to link wildlife to an ancient "creationism" of God, and found that robins were allied to those in chile, but the islands were different. He had heard that tiny changes in the shape of turtle shells could indicate which island they came from, but had not been able to collect them, which Darwin thought was almost like two different creators at work.
The Beagle studied how the atolls of the Cocos (Keeling) Archipelago formed, an investigation that supports Darwin's theory. In Cape Town, Darwin and Fitzroy met John Herschel, who recently wrote to Lyle praising his theory of unity as a bold speculation that "the mystery of extinction species being replaced by other species" as "a natural phenomenon contrary to the miraculous process". As the ship sailed home, he sorted out his notes, and Darwin wrote that if his growing suspicions of robins, turtles, and Falkland foxes were correct, then "these facts would destabilize the species", and then carefully add "will" before "destruction". He later wrote that, in my opinion, these facts "seem to have some revelation about the origin of the species."
Different evolutionary directions of robins between different islands
By the time he returned to England, Darwin had become a scientific celebrity
By the time the Beagle reached Falmouth, Cornwall, on 2 October 1836, Darwin was already a scientific celebrity. On 29 October, Charles Lyell eagerly met Darwin for the first time and quickly introduced him to a rising anatomist, Richard Owen, who had the equipment of the Royal College of Surgeons to study darwin's collection of fossil bones. Owen's surprising discoveries also included other extinct giant sloths, as well as the behemoth, an almost complete unknown snake scorpion skeleton and a hippopotamus-sized rodent skull, named toxodon, shaped like a giant capybara. The armor fragments actually came from a giant armadillo-like creature, which Darwin initially thought was such. These extinct creatures are related to those of South America.
Fossilized skeleton of the earth sloth
In mid-December, Darwin boarded in Cambridge, organizing his collection and rewriting his diary. He wrote his first paper, showing that the South American continent was slowly rising, and with Lyell's enthusiastic support, he read it to the Geological Society of London on 4 January 1837. On the same day, he presented his mammal and bird specimens to the Zoological Society. Ornithologist John Gould was quick to announce that the Galapagos bird, which Darwin believed to be a mixture of blackbirds, "beaks" and finches, was actually twelve different species of birds. On 17 February, Darwin was elected to the Board of Governors of the Geological Society, and Lyell's chairman report presented Owen's discovery of Darwin's stone, emphasizing the geographical continuity of species in support of his idea of unification
In early March, Darwin came to London and joined the social circle of scientists and experts in Lyle, who described God as a programmer of the law. Gould meets Darwin and tells him that galapagos robins from different islands are different species, not just variants. Darwin did not label the finches by island, but according to the records of others on the Beagle, including Fitzroy, he assigned the species to the islands. The two cougars are also of different species, and on March 14 Darwin announced how their distribution changed southward.
By mid-March, Darwin speculated in his red notebook the possibility that "one species would indeed transform into another" to explain the geographical distribution of living species like mountain lions and extinct species like giant Guanaco animals. His ideas about lifespan, asexual reproduction, and sexual reproduction developed into variants of offspring in the "b" notebook in mid-July, "Races Adapting and Changing the World," explaining the Galapagos turtle, robin, and mountain lion. He sketched out branching lineages, followed by lineage branches of a single evolutionary tree, in which "it is absurd to talk of one animal being higher than another", abandoning Lamarck's independent lineage to develop into a higher form.
Darwin completed his book On the Origin of Species in 1959
Darwin published his theory of evolution in his 1859 book On the Origin of Species, which contained convincing evidence that overcame the scientific community's rejection of the concept of early species transmutation. By the 1870s, the scientific community and most of the public had accepted evolution as a fact. However, many favor contradictory explanations, and it was not until the advent of modern evolutionary synthesis in the 1930s and 1950s that a broad consensus was formed that natural selection was the fundamental mechanism of evolution.
[China has long translated theory of evolution into evolution, and in my opinion, it is more appropriate to translate into evolution. Because the evolution of organisms does not always advance, sometimes it retreats. The most typical is the peacock, a beautiful feather for survival is meaningless, but will attract more hostile behavior, the existence of these feathers is only to satisfy the appreciation of the female peacock, which is a sexual choice. The reason for the main selection of sexual selection is precisely because the environment in which the peacock lives is too superior and there is no vicious competitive relationship, which leads to the degradation of the peacock population. The same is true in plants, where crops that have been domesticated by humans are becoming less and less able to withstand pests and diseases, and have become completely incapable of surviving independently without relying on artificial and agricultural assistance. Wild vegetables, on the other hand, can only survive on their own genes, and once they lose the ability to resist pests and diseases, there is only one way to extinction. 】