Explanation:
At first glance, Charles Darwin seems an unlikely revolutionary. Growing up a shy and unassuming member of a wealthy British family, he appeared, at least to his father, to be idle and directionless. But even as a child, Darwin expressed an interest in nature. Later, while studying botany at Cambridge University, he was offered a chance to work as an unpaid naturalist on the HMS Beagle, a naval vessel embarking on an exploratory voyage around the world. In the course of nearly five years at sea – during which time the Beagle surveyed the coast of South America and stopped in such places as Australia and, most famously, the Galapagos Islands – Darwin took advantage of countless opportunities to observe plant and animal life and to collect both living and fossilized specimens for later study.
This evolution, Darwin wrote, is due to two factors. The first factor, Darwin argued, is that each individual animal is marked by subtle differences that distinguish it from its parents. Darwin, who called these differences “variations,” understood their effect but not their cause; the idea of genetic mutation, and indeed the scientific study of genetics, would not arise fully until the early 20th century. The second factor, Darwin argued, is that although variations are random, some of them convey distinct advantages – superior camouflage, a heartier constitution or greater speed, for example – that better equip a creature to survive in its environment. A greater chance of survival allows for more opportunity to breed and pass on advantageous traits to a greater number of offspring. Over time, an advantage spreads throughout a species; in turn, the species is more likely to endure and reproduce. Thus, over the course of many generations, subtle changes occur and accumulate, eventually morphing into bigger changes and, possibly, eva new species.
Finally, the idea of a benevolent God who cared for his creation was seemingly challenged by Darwin’s depiction of the natural world as a savage and cruel place – “red in tooth and claw,” as Darwin’s contemporary, Alfred Lord Tennyson, wrote just a few years before On the Origin of Species was published. Darwin’s theory challenged the idea that the natural world existed in benevolent harmony.
Regardless of his intentions, Darwin’s ideas provoked a harsh and immediate response from religious leaders in Britain. For instance, England’s highest-ranking Catholic official, Henry Cardinal Manning, denounced Darwin’s views as “a brutal philosophy – to wit, there is no God, and the ape is our Adam.” Samuel Wilberforce, the Anglican Archbishop of Oxford and one of the most highly respected religious leaders in 19th-century England, also condemned natural selection in a now-famous speech on what he deemed the theory’s scientific deficiencies at an 1860 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. At one point during the meeting, Wilberforce reportedly asked biologist Thomas Henry Huxley whether he was related to an ape on his grandmother’s or grandfather’s side. Huxley, whose vigorous defense of evolutionary theory would earn him the nickname “Darwin’s bulldog,” allegedly replied that he would rather be the ancestor of a monkey than an advanced and intelligent human being who employed his “knowledge and eloquence in misrepresenting those who are wearing out their lives in the search for truth.”
