Darwin Day

The man who changed the world for ever is 211 today! Charles Darwin was born 12 February 1809 in Shrewsbury, Shropshire. His family was well off and he was able to try various university courses, studying medicine at Edinburgh and then moving to Cambridge with a thought to become a minister. He was always interested in the natural world and when the chance came to sign on as a self paid naturalist on HMS Beagle he jumped at it and the world would never be the same.

Before Darwin developed his theory of natural selection, published in The Origin of Species in 1859 the biblical view of creation was the fall back choice. Not everyone held to it and many including members of Darwin’s family had ideas about evolution but Darwin’s work broke the religious mold and showed how life evolved by natural processes.

Since then the Theory of Evolution has been reinforced by  every piece of new evidence and the naysayers are reduced to cowering in their corner, vaping about intelligent design, irreducible complexity and all the other wacky ideas that they dream up to challenge the evolution of life forms over billions of years.

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

This Style 10/6