What Was Charles Darwin's Theory 150 Years Later?
Scientific American Magazine December 15, 2008
Darwin's Living LegacyEvolutionary
Theory 150 Years Later
A Victorian amateur undertook a lifetime pursuit of slow, meticulous observation and thought about the natural world, producing a theory 150 years ago that still drives the contemporary scientific agenda
By Gary Stix
When the 26yearold Charles Darwin sailed into the Galápagos Islands in 1835 aboard the HMS
Beagle
, he took little notice of a collection of birds that are now intimately associated with his name. The naturalist, in fact, misclassified as grosbeaks some of the birds that are now known as
Darwin’s finches. After Darwin returned to England, ornithologist and artist John Gould began to make illustrations of a group of preserved bird specimens brought back in the …show more content…
Milestones along the way included experiencing the great diversity of species in tropical Brazil and discovery of fossils, including a giant sloth 400 miles south of Buenos Aires, which caused him to ponder how these creatures became extinct. Accounts by gauchos on the Argentine pampas of their killing of indigenous peoples taught him about the primal, territorial impulses of the human animal. And of course, there was the relatively brief, fiveweek stay in the “frying hot” Galápagos, where he was able to contemplate how closely related species of turtles and mockingbirds inhabited neighboring islands, implying a common ancestry for both groups.
At sea, Darwin also read avidly two volumes of Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology that embraced the idea of “uniformitarianism” in which the processes of erosion, sedimentation and volcanic activity occurred in the past at about the same rates as they do now. Lyell rejected the then prevailing catastrophism, which holds that sudden, violent events driven by
Darwin's Living LegacyEvolutionary
Theory 150 Years Later
A Victorian amateur undertook a lifetime pursuit of slow, meticulous observation and thought about the natural world, producing a theory 150 years ago that still drives the contemporary scientific agenda
By Gary Stix
When the 26yearold Charles Darwin sailed into the Galápagos Islands in 1835 aboard the HMS
Beagle
, he took little notice of a collection of birds that are now intimately associated with his name. The naturalist, in fact, misclassified as grosbeaks some of the birds that are now known as
Darwin’s finches. After Darwin returned to England, ornithologist and artist John Gould began to make illustrations of a group of preserved bird specimens brought back in the …show more content…
Milestones along the way included experiencing the great diversity of species in tropical Brazil and discovery of fossils, including a giant sloth 400 miles south of Buenos Aires, which caused him to ponder how these creatures became extinct. Accounts by gauchos on the Argentine pampas of their killing of indigenous peoples taught him about the primal, territorial impulses of the human animal. And of course, there was the relatively brief, fiveweek stay in the “frying hot” Galápagos, where he was able to contemplate how closely related species of turtles and mockingbirds inhabited neighboring islands, implying a common ancestry for both groups.
At sea, Darwin also read avidly two volumes of Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology that embraced the idea of “uniformitarianism” in which the processes of erosion, sedimentation and volcanic activity occurred in the past at about the same rates as they do now. Lyell rejected the then prevailing catastrophism, which holds that sudden, violent events driven by