Evolution What the Fossils Say and Why it Matters

FIGURE 4.1. We are familiar with pictures of Darwin as a sickly, bearded old man, but when he traveled the
world on the Beagle voyage, climbed the Andes, and came up with natural selection, he was a vigorous young
man in his twenties. Darwin’s 5-year research expedition would have been equivalent to a Ph.D. project,
because there were no modern doctoral programs back in 1836. The original caption reads, “How Charles
Darwin might have looked as a modern graduate student just back from five years of field work. The picture
is intended to fix in readers’ minds that Darwin was at his most innovative at this age, and readers should
remember that Darwin might now be denied admission to a good graduate school because of his deficiencies
in languages and math.” (From P. R. Darlington Jr., 1980, Evolution for Naturalists: The Simple Principles and
Complex Reality, frontispiece. Reprinted with permission of John Wiley & Sons, Inc.)