†Charles Darwin†

Charles Darwin began his journey aboard H.M.S. Beagle from 1831-1836. He visited the Galápagos archipelago, and found birds with different beaks, signifying that they all had different appetites. He also found tortoises carrying differently shaped shells. These observations led Darwin to conclude that Earth’s living diversity has arisen by an organic process of descent with modification– evolution.

He then wrote his own book titled The Origin of Species (full title is: On the Origins of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life), which convinced mostly everyone except the Anglican Church. Many scientists rejected the very idea of evolution, but many people began to widely accept Darwinism. But it wasn’t until 1940 that Darwinism triumphed after it had been successfully interrogated with genetics. The weird thing is that Darwin was born on February 12 as was Abraham Lincoln. People even used Darwinism to argue against slavery. If animals evolved, and African Americans must’ve also evolved to become the skin color of black, so if we treat animals with different colors but of the same species the same, then why shouldn’t we treat African Americans the same as ourselves?

 He began the idea of natural selection which is the process by which favorable heritable traits become more common in successive generations of a population of reproducing organisms, and unfavorable heritable traits become less common, due to differential reproduction of genotypes. In his book On the Origin of Species, natural selection was described by analogy to artificial selection, a process by which animals with traits considered desirable by human breeders are systematically favored for reproduction.

In 2003, sequencing of the human genome is completed. Close similarity between the human and chimpanzee genomes underscores their descent from common ancestor. Today, biologists continue to expand on Darwin’s initial insights, incorporating new genetic, paleontological, and behavioral evidence. Variation among species is seen to be in part the result of mechanisms controlling how genes are switched on and off during an organism’s development.  These devolvements were all started between Darwinism and Genetics founded by Charles Darwin and Gregor Mendel.