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Personality: Scientist who changed everything
Charles Darwin (1809 — 1882) was born on the same day as Abraham Lincoln (Feb 12, 1809) — a coincidence which led one of his biographers to call him the “emancipator of human mind from the shackles of ignorance” just as Lincoln was the emancipator of human body from the shackles of slavery.
The year 1809 was rich with its meteoric shower of geniuses — Darwin, Lincoln, Gladstone, Chopin, Mendelssohn, Poe, Tennyson, Holmes and Elizabeth Browning. Each one of them contributed some thing to the permanent beauty and nobility of the world — and Darwin’s contribution is most prominent among them. He presented the theory of evolution, which changed the entire face of human history.
As a child, Darwin was gentle, mediative, and very observant of his surroundings. Even when he faced danger, he was able to pursue his observations in the midst of fear. From his earliest childhood, he formed the habit of observing things for himself. He loved to collect and study all sorts of pebbles, shells, coins, birds’ eggs, and insects.
Darwin belonged to a noble lineage from both his mother’s as well as father’s side. He had little opportunity to know his mother, because she died when he was only eight years old. His father, Dr Robert W. Darwin, was a wise man, but could not understand his son’s character. He considered Darwin a good-for-nothing loafer whose only mission in life was to mess up the house with everlasting rubbish, earning himself the nickname Poco Curante — a rather careless creature.
Darwin generally did not pay heed to his father’s suggestions and did as he wished. He fixed up a secret laboratory in his garden and began to dabble in chemistry and in physics.
In the fall of 1831, Darwin sailed with His Majesty’s Ship, Beagle, as an unpaid naturalist. The ship sailed for five years (1831 — 1836) giving Darwin the opportunity to observe the world and the mysteries of its teeming life closely. He collected, observed and classified the scattered fragments of the Chinese puzzle of existence and tried to piece them together into a comprehensive and comprehensible design.
However, thus far he had formed no definite idea as to the direction in which his investigations were leading him. Like every true observer, he began not with a theory but with facts. It was to take him twenty years of laborious research before he could determine that his vast accumulation of facts, when examined impartially, pointed to but a single theory — the theory of evolution.
To Darwin, the whole world was a big question mark — a problem in mathematics with many unknown quantities, a geometric theorem which must be solved. He once confessed that he had lost his taste for literature, art and music at a very early age. But he had found literature, art and music in his science.
When Darwin first discovered the theory of evolution, he felt his duty to kill the old dogma in order to re-establish what he regarded as a still older truth. He believed that man had risen from savagery to civilization rather than from civilization to savagery.
He first formulated this theory of progress, in a tentative outline, as early as 1839 — twenty years before the publication of Origin of Species. In 1842 he developed this outline into a sketch of 35 pages, and in 1844 he expanded it further into a manuscript of 230 pages. But instead of printing this manuscript he continued for another fifteen years to test his data, to detect flaws in his arguments, and to check and recheck his conclusions repeatedly.
The first edition of the book was issued on Nov 24, 1859, under the cumbersome title Origin of species by means of natural selection or preservation of favoured races in the struggle of life. In this world there is a constant multiplication of living organisms. The food supply is, however, limited as is the available living space in the world. The result is that life and death compete between all living things.
Those best fitted to their environment are able to live, and the rest are doomed to die. The evolutionists call this process “survival of the fittest”. In the course of time the environment keeps changing, forcing the living creatures to change as well, or to evolve from one species to another, in order to survive under new conditions. The process by which this evolution takes place is called natural selection — that is, nature’s selection of those characteristics that enable the species to survive, and eliminate those characters, which are no longer required for survival in the new environment.
Darwin is generally credited (or discredited) with the theory that men are descended from monkeys. As a matter of fact, he never said anything of the sort. He believed that men and apes had evolved from a common prehistoric ancestor that is now extinct. The ape, in other words, is not our forefather but a distant cousin.
Man, according to Darwin, is the highest form of animal life as per law of the survival of fittest. By fittest, Darwin does not necessarily mean strongest but the most adaptable. Among the lower animals, natural selection assumes the form of elimination through physical strife.
It would be interesting to read about additions made in the theory of evolution. The mutation (the changes brought about in the genetic material) is now considered one of the important parts of evolution. Such changes are generally stable. If these changes are in accordance with the environment, the species would survive and progress. In case the said changes are not suitable for the prevailing environment, it would get eliminated.
In this way, new species are produced all the time. The fit survive and the unfit get eliminated.
The writer is a former senior scientific officer of the PCSIR Laboratories, Karachi
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