On February 12th 1809, two great emancipators were born. One would become a republican president who freed the slaves: the other freed the world from mythical creation stories and the haunting question of how we got here. The former was named Abraham Lincoln, and the latter is Charles Darwin. My blog post today is about the latter.
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The young Charles Darwin was not a motivated student. He found lectures to be a bore and did not finish his studies in medicine, natural history, or the arts. It wan not until he took a five year long journey on the HMS Beagle to map the coast of South America that the young intellectual rose to prominence.
On this voyage he meticulously collected many different species of animals and began to see patterns in their origins and similarities. Another thing that struck him as odd was how certain fossils would be visible in places they did not belong, such as the bizarre find of seashells high in the Andes mountains.
The Beagle made its long voyage around the world, and when it returned to England, Darwin had all the building blocks he needed to publish his famous book On the Origin of Species. This book proposed a theory of evolution based on natural selection. Though it was not almost unanimously recognized as correct by the scientific community for quite some time, it was the only theory that did not buckle under decades of skepticism.
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| Did I mention he had an awesome beard? |
Darwin’s theory attracted the interest of many religious institutions alongside scientific ones. Even though he was careful to downplay the role of natural selection in the creation of humans, simply stating; “Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.” He still got mixed responses to his theory. Some liberal men of faith defended it as the assurance that god is creating omnipotent laws to govern our world, while others would claim that his ideas were blasphemy. Even in our world, some religious people doubt that truth of Darwin’s theory.
The theory of evolution opened many doors in science, and poked many holes in faith. Lincoln may have freed the slaves, but Darwin freed the minds of the people. I have nothing but respect for this man, and his theory that undoubtedly changed the world.
