HE WAS AN indifferent student who liked collecting bugs. He studied medicine but hated the sight of surgery. He even tried his hand at divinity studies but preferred to be out shooting and hunting. Charles Darwin failed at many things but his name is universally known for his great success at one – evolution.
His discoveries were so important and so ground-breaking that his name remains fresh in the public’s imagination, even though 200 years have passed since his birth on this day.
Born into a wealthy family with close connections to the famous Wedgwoods, he had a privileged upbringing in a comfortable home, with only the tragically early death of his mother to trouble him. He floundered for a time during his youth as he sought a career, but his life changed forever at the age of 22 when he signed him on as an unpaid naturalist on board HMS Beagle. The ship set sail on December 27th, 1831, on a two-year mission to survey the east and west coastlines of South America; but the journey eventually lasted almost five years. Wherever he went, Darwin meticulously catalogued what he saw, building up a geological and botanical collection and filling notebooks with detailed information.
Most importantly, visits to the Galapagos Islands and other isolated places revealed distinct species of birds and animals that he knew must be closely related to others found on the mainland or other nearby islands. It encouraged him to seek reasons for how unique animal species arose so readily, something he later developed into his theory of natural selection. Darwin did not propose evolution, this theory was already well recognised by scientists in the mid-1800s. How evolution occurred over time was not understood, however, and this is Darwin’s great legacy to humanity.
The howwas natural selection, the process that sees attributes that aid survival passed on to the next generation and the disappearance of attributes that do not aid survival. The idea had a long gestation, given it took Darwin 23 years from the end of his sojourn on the Beaglebefore formally publishing his theories in On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. The book sold out when published in 1859, and caused surprisingly little fuss, given it undermined the primacy of God in the creation of species. Yet On the Origin of Speciesput Darwin's ideas on a later collision course with those who support the creationist view and Darwin has been held up as a hate figure for those who reject evolution. "You have to look at the way his views have impinged on religious views," says Dan Bradley, professor of population genetics at Trinity College Dublin. "That is why in the public view the man has remained current." This clash keeps Darwin in the news even today, particularly in the US where evolution is dismissed by many as little more than a theory. And for this reason the powerful Christian right in the US campaigns vociferously for equal treatment for creationist theory in biology text books. Yet evolution and natural selection cannot be rejected as theory given the wealth of evidence seen in fossil remains, the results of breeding programmes and genome studies.
“Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution,” said Ukrainian evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky (1900-1975). “Darwin’s insights are absolutely central in biology,” says Bradley. Researchers in medical genetics hold a similar view. “I think that evolution is the glue that holds everything together,” states Prof Ray Stallings, head of cancer genetics at both the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland and the Children’s Research Centre at Our Lady’s Hospital, Crumlin, Dublin.
“It is true for all of the areas of biology. [Evolution] continues to inform us. We are still learning huge amounts from it,” he says. He, too, is dismayed at the creationist rejection of Darwin. “Certainly in the US it is still a raging controversy. The creationists are damaging society; they try to control what is taught in the classroom and insist on their theories being presented . . . as an alternative to evolution.”
Natural selection remains with us today. Our environment is currently undergoing dramatic change, something that has triggered a massive extinction of species. “The ecology of the world is changing and you can read this in the DNA of species,” says Bradley. Humankind, too, will continue to evolve and change, although in what way we cannot predict. “How we are going to evolve and which way we are going to evolve is unclear,” says Bradley.
“We see the results of evolution on a daily basis,” adds Stallings, pointing out that research has revealed the DNA-based interconnectedness between fruit flies, worms and primates. “It is such a wonderful time in biomedical sciences.”