Charles Darwin (1809-1882)
Victorian Literature
INTRODUCTION
Charles Darwin has become an icon in our time, no less important than Columbus, Newton, Jefferson, Edison, Einstein, or Gates. He is seen as projecting out of the Victorian era like a colossus. The 1800’s are no less awe-inspiring than ours’ for its intellectual mindset and technological feats. Yet his morally severe and pompously conservative age was very different from our secular, deregulated world founded on naturalistic principles and fast information exchange. Darwin's theory of evolution was published in the On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection in 1859. As its implications sank in, late Victorians saw the very foundations of human ...
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unsuccessful, but he loved beach combing with Dr Robert E. Grant, a sponge expert, Lamarckian evolutionist, a democrat and materialist, who trained Darwin in French-style invertebrate anatomy. At student clubs, where Darwin reported his observations, he saw fiery radicals censored for calling the mind a product of a material brain, and giving animals all of the human mental faculties. So, besides training in field geology and natural history that would serve him well, Darwin was taught the social consequences of subversive science.
His father wanted him in a profession, and Darwin was back again to conventional Anglicanism, after three years of divinity at Christ's College, Cambridge. Darwin had little calling, but his collateral education continued, as he learned botany and geological strata mapping. He received his BA degree left the environment of the Church and was placed aboard a surveying ship, H.M.S. Beagle.
VOYAGE ON H.M.S. BEAGLE AND PERSONAL LIFE
From 1831 to 1836, ...
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toward humanity.
He wrestled with the issues of extinction, life spans of species, adaptation, diversification and leaving mutated descendants. The voyage gave him insights into adaptation, populations, ecology, life's primeval emergence, and the causes of variation in species.
Upon his return to London Darwin conducted thorough research of his notes and specimens. Out of this study grew several related theories. One, evolution did occur. Two, evolutionary change was gradual, requiring thousands to millions of years. Three, the primary mechanism for evolution was a process called natural selection. And four, the millions of species living today arose from a single original life ...
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"Charles Darwin (1809-1882)." Essayworld.com. October 29, 2006. Accessed December 23, 2024. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Charles-Darwin-1809-1882/54753.
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