Darwin and Natural Selection ...........................................................

LECTURE

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?

W

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.