The story of Darwin as a child

Born on February 12, 1809, into a wealthy family of doctors, Charles Darwin was an idle boy in his youth, not a genius on a historical mission. His father once accused him: "You will be a disgrace to yourself and your whole family if you do nothing but hunt, play with dogs, and catch mice." Of course, he was keen to collect ore and insect specimens at this time, but it was a common hobby among boys, and there was nothing special about it, although we can now consider his future scientific research to be a continuation of his childhood interest. In the autumn of 1825, the elder Darwin, preparing for his son's succession, sent him to the Edinburgh Medical School. Unfortunately, little Darwin had no interest in medicine, and what was worse was that he was fragile by nature and did not dare to face the blood on the operating table. Two years later, I dropped out of medical school. Becoming a doctor and a priest was a decent profession, Darwin obeyed his father and went to Cambridge to study theology. Although he had little interest in theology, and probably spent much more time hunting and collecting beetle specimens than he did his studies, he finally graduated in 1831 and was ready to become a country pastor for the rest of his life.

Darwin, looking back on his life in his later years, considered all of his so-called higher education to be a complete waste. He found the formal classes boring and didn't learn much from the classes. But during these years, he became acquainted with a group of excellent naturalists outside of his class, from whom he received scientific training. His gift for naturalism was also appreciated by these naturalists. In 1831, when the botanist J. Hens Lou (J. Henslou) was born. Ｓ。 When Henslow was asked to recommend a young naturalist for the round-the-world voyage of the Beagle, he recommended Darwin. Darwin's father vigorously objected to his son's participation in the voyage, believing that it would delay his son's career in theology. After Darwin's repeated pleas, the elder Darwin finally relented, saying that if he could find a respectable person to support him in going, he could go. Darwin found his uncle, his future father-in-law, to convince his father, and by chance passed the notoriously harsh Fitzroy (R. Darwin). Captain Fitzroy set sail with the Beagle in late 1831, passing through the Atlantic, South America, and Pacific Oceans, surveying geology, flora, and fauna along the way. Along the way, Dahl took a large number of observation notes and collected countless specimens and shipped them back to England, providing first-hand information for his future research. Five years later, the Beagle circled the globe and returned to the UK.

When Darwin stepped aboard the Beagle, he was a biblical theological graduate, an orthodox Christian, and his piety was often ridiculed by seamen. But when he returned to England, the Old Testament seemed to him to be nothing more than a "very clear false history of the world," no more reliable than the holy books of Hinduism. He completely abandoned the Christian faith and gradually became a skeptic or rationalist who did not believe in the existence of God, and his starting point was to doubt the belief that all living things were created by God.

While circumnavigating the globe, there were three sets of facts that prevented Darwin from accepting creationist teachings: first, the continuity of biological species. He excavated some fossils of extinct armadillos in South America, almost identical to the skeletons of the locally surviving armadillos, but much larger. In his opinion, it can be assumed that the current armadillo evolved from this extinct armadillo. Second, the presence of endemic species. As he travels through the savannah, he notices that one ostrich is gradually being replaced by another, albeit similar, ostrich. Each region has endemic species that are both different and similar, not so much as the result of separate creations by God, but rather the result of separate evolutions of the same ancestors in a state of geographical isolation. Third, there is evidence from the islands of the ocean. He compared the taxa on the Cape Verde Islands in Africa and the Galapagos Islands in South America. The two archipelagos have similar geographical environments, and if the creatures were created by God, it is reasonable that similar taxa should be created in a similar geographical environment, but the biota of the two archipelago are very different. In fact, the biota of the Cape Verde archipelago are closer to the African continent near it, and apparently, it should be considered that the organisms on the island came from the continent and gradually changed. This evolutionary process is even more pronounced on the Galapagos Islands. Darwin discovered that the islands that make up the archipelago have their own unique species of turtles, lizards and finches, although they have similar environments. There is no reason to think that God deliberately created these unique species on a small island, and it is more reasonable to think that these endemic species all evolved under the conditions of geographical isolation of the same ancestor.

In 1837, a year after the end of the Beagle's trip, Darwin began secretly studying the theory of evolution. His first notes were on the variation of plants and animals in domestic and natural environments. He studied all the information he could get his hands on: personal observations and experiments, other people's papers, correspondence with biologists at home and abroad, conversations with gardeners and keepers, and so on, and soon came to the conclusion that the variation in domestic plants and animals was the result of careful selection. But where did the natural mutation come about? He still doesn't know. A year later, he read Malthus's Treatise on Population in his leisure. Malthus believed that the population would inevitably grow faster than the means of subsistence, and that it would inevitably lead to poverty and competition for the means of subsistence. Darwin suddenly realized that Malthus's theories could also be applied to the biological world. The reproduction rate of all organisms increases exponentially, and the number of offspring is quite staggering, but the number of biota is relatively stable, which indicates that only a few of the progeny of organisms can survive, and there must be a competition for resources. Darwin further deduced that individuals of any species are different and there are variations, which may be neutral or may affect survivability, resulting in strong or weak individual survivability. In the competition for survival, individuals with strong survivability can produce more offspring, the race can reproduce, and its genetic traits gradually gain an advantage in quantity, while individuals with weak viability are gradually eliminated, that is, the so-called "survival of the fittest", and the result is that the biological species gradually change due to adaptation to the environment. Darwin called this process natural selection.

Therefore, in Darwin's view, the origin of the giraffe is not the result of using it to waste and retreat, but because the ancestors of the giraffe originally had a mutation of the long neck, when the environment changed and food was scarce, the long neck had a survival advantage because it could eat the leaves on the high part of the tree, and the result of generation after generation of selection, the trait of the long neck spread in the group, and then gave rise to the new species of giraffe.

Although Darwin was inspired by the idea of natural selection after reading The Theory of Population, it was only after four years, after collecting a large amount of information, that he began to write down the theory and gave the manuscript to some friends for advice. He knew too well what the shock to society would be if his theory was published, and as a man of peace by nature, he wanted to avoid it, so he left a will that his manuscript on evolution could only be published after his death.

But in the summer of 1858, Darwin received a letter from Wallace that forced him to publish the theory of natural selection during his lifetime. Wallace was a young biogeographer who was on an expedition to the Malay Archipelago at the time. Like Darwin, his observations of the geographical distribution of organisms led him to think about the evolution of organisms. In February of that year, he had an intermittent fever, and during his illness, he suddenly thought of Malthus's "Theory of Population", which led to the independent discovery of the theory of natural selection. He came from a poor background, and was extremely anti-Christian, and did not have all the concerns of Darwin *** for the upper classes, so with the vigor of a newborn calf that was not afraid of tigers, he wrote a paper on natural selection in three nights and sent it to Darwin for advice. Little did he know that Darwin, who had been studying the theory of evolution for twenty years, had come to Darwin only because of his high position in biogeography, which had been established after Darwin had completed the voyage of the Beagle.

When Darwin read Wallace's paper and saw his own theories appear in someone else's pen, his shock and dismay can be imagined. His first thought was to suppress his achievements and let Wallace enjoy the honor to himself. But his friends, the geographer Ryle and the botanist Hooke, had already read his manuscripts on natural selection, and at their suggestion, Darwin condensed his manuscript into a paper that was published in the Journal of the Linnay Society in 1859 at the same time as Wallace's paper. These two papers did not cause much repercussions. It was also at the urging of Ryle and Hooke that Darwin published On the Origin of Species in the same year (only about a third of the length of the manuscript he had been preparing for many years), which caused an uproar and conquered the scientific community.

Because of the success of On the Origin of Species, or perhaps because of Darwin's personality and intelligence, Wallace shared the credit for discovering the theory of natural selection, but he always gave Darwin the credit for the discovery of the theory of natural selection, and called the theory of natural selection "Darwinism", a term that is still used today.