Darwin and Natural Selection Lecture 13
The result of being born into a family that had money and a commitment to research was that [Darwin] was able to spend most of his life studying the one thing he most wanted to study, which was the natural world. You really do have to envy him. How many of us would love to be so privileged?
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e’ve seen repeatedly that modern scienti¿c accounts of the Universe are historical; they tell a story of change at all scales, from the scale of the Universe to the scale of human history. Darwin’s great achievement was to show that this is also true of living species. This lecture describes Darwin’s elegant solution to the riddle of adaptation. One of Darwin’s grandfathers, Erasmus Darwin, was a doctor who was intrigued by how living organisms seemed to change over time. His other grandfather, Josiah Wedgwood, was a well-known scientist, a friend of James Watt and chemist Joseph Priestly, and the founder of the Wedgwood pottery works. As a child, Darwin (1809–1882) was fascinated by the natural world. His father despaired of him, writing, “You care for nothing but shooting, dogs and rat-catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family” (Eldredge, Darwin, p. 22). Darwin resisted pressure to become a surgeon (he was appalled by the screams of patients undergoing operations without anesthesia) or a clergyman. He wrote in his autobiography, “No pursuit at Cambridge was followed with nearly so much eagerness or gave me so much pleasure as collecting beetles” (Eldredge, Darwin, p. 24). Darwin described as the most important event of his life an invitation that he received in 1831 from Captain Robert Fitzroy to travel around the world as the naturalist on a ship called the Beagle. The voyage lasted from 1831 to 1836. It took Darwin to South America, around Cape Horn, across the Paci¿c via the Galapagos Islands, Tahiti, and New Zealand, to Australia, Mauritius, around South Africa, to Cape Verde Island, and back to Britain. Darwin collected specimens and fossils and took detailed biological and geological notes.
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