Life on earth has been evolving since millions of years but we realised of it just 200 hundred years ago. The credit ought to go to Charles Robert Darwin, the author of the “On the origin of Species”. He was born on 12 February 1809 in England and was a naturalist who realised that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestors. He proposed the scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called natural selection. He published his theory with compelling evidence for evolution in his 1859 book “On the origin of Species”.
The popular perception of Charles Darwin and his work is that, the present day human has descended from the ape. This concept may appear scientifically acceptable today but was wholly rejected by the Christian world of the early nineteenth century. As per the Christian ideology of those days, the origin of the human race could only start with Adam and Eve and therefore the evolutionary theory was rejected. The Archbishop was one of his sternest critics and had sarcastically wanted know which of his grandparent was a monkey. One of Darwin's disciples had retorted by saying that Darwin certainly did not descend from a pope!
Darwin's understanding of the evolution of the different life forms came during his five years of sea voyage on the H.M.S.Beagle between Dec. 1831 - Oct. 1836. Crossing the Atlantic Ocean Beagle arrived at St. Helena Island from South Africa and then went on to South America.
It was in Santiago in Cape Verde Island that Darwin made his first curious discovery. He found a horizontal white band of shells within a cliff face along the shoreline of Porto Praya. The fact that this layer was forty-five feet above sea level raised some interesting questions for Darwin.
The arrangement of the shell layer appeared to support Lyell's theory of a world slowly changing over great periods of time, a novel concept in Darwin's day. This observation, and many others like it, would later lead Darwin to develop his own theory of rising continents and sinking ocean floors.
Darwin's theory of evolution and the survival of the fittest brought to fore the concept of change and the mechanism of change. From a metaphysical outlook, Darwin took the first step towards the dialectical materialistic world view which was later enormously developed by Karl Marx and Engel. Darwin died on 19th April 1882.
No comments:
Post a Comment