Darwin and his Garden of Eden

“The fellow who wants to make out that we all have tails like monkeys”, was the common introduction given to Charles Darwin when he published The Origin of Species in 1859. The chief argument of the book is evolution and its primary output, Principal of Natural Selection.  The world was not created the way we see it today by the infinite might of the great Architect. It has evolved: arisen little by little from a small beginning. Its complexity has increased with many elementary and some overwhelming forces acting upon it and its inhabitants.

How life has evolved and has taken current shape has been a matter of contemplation for thousands of years. The species that abound today were born so or have been transformed into this form by compelling forces. What are these forces that have impelled elementary and the first living beings like amoeba to develop into a complex creature like human beings?  Book of Genesis implied that cats and dogs, snakes and birds, elephants and tigers, oysters and whales, men and women were all separately created and placed in the Garden of Eden. Empedocles, the Greek philosopher said that all forms of life are transformations of four elements, Fire, Air, Earth and Water effected by two forces, attraction and repulsion. Some years later, Aristotle grouped all animals with backbones together and called them blood relations to the great consternation of people and Goethe said that all the shapes of creation are cousins and there must be some common stock from which all have sprung.

Algae that are more efficient in extracting sunlight will grow faster; a rabbit that runs faster is more likely to escape its predator. Evolution is also use and disuse. If you have no eyes and want to see, you will finally get eyes, and conversely if you have eyes and don’t want to see, you will lose your eyes like a mole or subterranean fish, if you like eating tender tops of trees and concentrate all your energies on stretching your neck, you get a neck like giraffe. This process by which some traits become common in a population (long necks in giraffes) due to consistent efforts for survival is called natural selection. Here environment acts as sieve through which only certain variations can pass.

Charles Darwin was interested in natural history, which he probably drew from his grandfather Erasmus Darwin. He did not like the medical school at the University of Edinburgh and was later sent to Christ College, Cambridge for Bachelor of Arts. He became a close friend and follower of botany professor John Stevens Henslow and was known as “the man who walks with Henslow”. In the final examination for B.A. he came tenth out of 178 students. It was Prof. Henslow who proposed Darwin as a suitable though unfinished gentleman for now famous journey on HMS Beagle that lasted for five years. He spent most of his time on the ship collecting natural history specimens, investigating geology and kept extensive notes in a Red Notebook where he also talked of a single evolutionary tree and wrote “It is absurd to talk of one animal being higher than another”. These notes, observations and thoughts were compiled into this magnum opus. The complete name of the book is “The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life”. It revolutionized science, philosophy and theology and till date remains one of the most influential book in natural sciences ever written and a work not just important to its time but to the history of humankind.

In recognition of his work, he was given a state funeral and is buried at Westminster Abbey next to Issac Newton.  During Darwin’s time, many geographical features were given his name, more than 120 species and 9 genera are named after him.  In 1947, Galápagos Islands became popularly known as "Darwin's finches" and all this because he only said there are monkeys without tails.