Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution

The Galapagos archipelago, a small group of tiny islands located off of Ecuador on the equator in the Pacific Ocean. For millions of years, these islands have been changing, moving, dying, growing, and than, producing and holding life, and still are.

Charles Darwin, a failure to his family for not going into the family business, becoming doctor.  He was a scientist and great thinker. He changed the world, and the Galapagos did too.

From the ancient times of the Greek and Romans, there has always been a theory of evolution. All things were related, and all have descended from the same common ancestor. Darwin, a strong believer in that theory, added more to it. He is considered the father of the natural selection theory.

Before the Galapagos, Darwin traveled from his home in England and spent a lot in South America on the HMS Beagle. He spent 5 years circumnavigating the World and making observations.  He discovered that animals were replaced in time and space. Over time, he realized, animals changed. And as animals moved to new places, they would adapt to their new environment. This greatly affected his ideas of the Galapagos.

When Darwin arrived in the Galapagos, he saw what it held. Secrets of what the Earth once was. It was as if he had gone back in time, to a place of creation, where the most basic of life was thriving. He had found something else too. Creatures. Animals. Overtime, when Darwin explored each island, he found that each creature he came across, was the same as the one he had just seen another island, yet also it was different. He would see one bird on an island with a flat beak and a dull end, and the same bird on a different island with a curved beak and a sharp end. Of course, he found this fascinating. He studied it. It proved to him that his first idea was right, time and space truly did change things.

It wasn’t till after he got back to England that he discovered what his findings truly meant. It lie before his eyes, and he took his time before realizing it was there. The explanation of the change, why it happened, and how it did, was his, and he was determined to share it. He realized the change was never meant to happen, it was just an accident. A mutation. When, for example, the Mocking Bird moved to a new location, and reproduced, a glitch occurred. Maybe the beak had an extra length to it. This bird was still the same as its parents, accept for that small change. When it grew older, it thrived and advanced more than the others birds. When the new different bird reproduced, it gave its offspring the same adaption. As more birds picked up the adaption, the ones without it started to die out, and soon, each and every bird in the new location had the longer beak. This was what Darwin had found, natural selection. It changes the way we look at life, and science. Darwin was the first of his time to question creation, or the Church, and prove it wrong. If he hadn’t, our ideas and actions would be very very different. Darwin set our lives on a different path. And now, we credit him for much of how we think and act.