‘On The Origin Of Species By Means Of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life’ (Published 1859).

This was the book, 502 pages long, bound in green cloth and rather expensive at 14 shillings, which would change the world.

“My work is now nearly finished,” wrote Darwin, “but as it will take me many more years to complete it, and as my health is far from strong, I have been urged to publish this extract.”

Another natural scientist named Alfred Russell Wallace had independently arrived at virtually the same theory of evolution by natural selection that Darwin believed to be his own.

Darwin had not been hasty in drawing his conclusions, and was, as he said “forced” to publish after decades of close observation, classification and study.

His discovery began with his appointment at twenty two, though wholly untrained, as naturalist on the voyage of the ‘Beagle’ from 1831 to 1836. He began collecting specimens and making notes in Cape Verde. In Brazil, he gathered beetles and flowers, shot lizards and saw his first monkey.

And it was in the Galapagos’s 61 islands, with their own mini-climate, (home to 607 species of plants, 29 species of land birds, 19 species of seabirds, and 484 species of fish), where he collected finches, mockingbirds and turtles, arriving home with an immense booty, the treasure chest of a naturalist.

It was the visit to these islands which persuaded him to study nature and abandon what would have been a secure career in those easy pastures of the Anglican Church preserved for men of Darwin’s class.

With the patience and resourcefulness of a true scholar, he set about the task of clarifying the precise taxonomy of these species. Finding his study incomplete, and his memory of the trip to the Galapagos cloudy, he set about consulting experts, and also writing letters to members of the crew concerning which islands had yielded which species of animal, and thence how should they be classified.

He found them hard to classify, that species were not ‘fixed’ as previously believed, and that birds, for example, with different characteristics, let’s say, a sharper beak and red feathers, when they became isolated on a separate island, displaying, maybe, more passive behaviour, became a new species of the bird altogether.

A subspecies with slight differences had assumed an entirely new type. Then the ‘transmutation’ of one species into another was possible. His study of fossils in South America compounded this initial discovery, by allowing him to compare living creatures with those which were now extinct. The species were changing over time.

From his study at Down House, a few miles to the south-east of London, his home where he settled and virtually became a recluse, he wrote some fourteen thousand letters in his researches.

He studied the infant grimaces and smiles of his own children, comparing them to monkeys, and examined minutely all the plant and animal life in his garden and grounds, complete with its Thinking Path for walking and reflecting.

The book, when it arrived, shook the millions of Christians who believed literally in the Old Testament account in Genesis of the Creation. This was the greatest challenge to Christian monopoly, and that certainty, and it came from a book of striking clarity and easy access, which deals almost exclusively with the genealogy of several plants and animals.

Darwin’s theory removed God as the central force of life. It was the beginning of the end of the long-held conviction that the human species was special, supreme and chosen.

The core of it is the theory of natural selection. This, briefly, is based on three observations:
First, that organisms produce far more offspring than could possibly survive. The second observation is that all organisms vary. Third, these variations are inherited. The conclusion was that only the fittest survive, those with individual differences better adapted to the environment.

“...there is a frequently recurring struggle for existence. It follows that any being, if it vary however slightly in any manner profitable to itself, will have a better chance of surviving and thus be naturally selected.”

This earth-shattering theory was approached with great scientific caution by Darwin, who was first a naturalist, then a theorist.

Many churchmen forced their congregations to choose– Christ or Darwin; was man created by God or is he just a baboon? The scientific evidence was more provable than God’s law, and nothing could stop the spread of the book.

Social Darwinists jumped at the theory to justify their racial or class doctrines: one race is superior to another, or a rich man is ‘fitter’ than a poor man. Darwin repudiated these interpretations at the time, saying “The theory of evolution is not a contest which leads to a super-species or race; rather it emphasizes the common beginnings of all life and represents a celebration of the eventual diversity.”

And yet, even at the beginning of the twenty-first century, there is still religious opposition to the teaching of Darwin’s theory in some American schools. Creationists have put forward the theory of ‘intelligent design’, a term which I understand as, we were perfect and complete in the first place. In most schools, however, Creation is being taught alongside evolution. Darwin, the former clergyman put it eloquently in his final firm words of ‘The Origin of Species’:

“There is a grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers; having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one… from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been and are being evolved.”

The above is summarized from Melvyn Bragg’s ‘Twelve Books that Changed the World’.