What we owe to Charles Darwin? Everything...
He has spend his invaluable five years of his young life on a lonely floating ship called Beagle investigating the roots of human evolution. (1831-1836) (http://www.newscientist.com/gallery/dn16574-darwin-adventures)
What extraordinary Darwing did to uncover the evolution as a uncompromisable process shaping the human life experienced today? This was revealed during a seminar organised by School of Information Technology to mark the celebration of Darwin`s 200th birthday today.
As one quotation of Darwin still linegers in my memory says, "Whatever I did I did for my pleasure coming out of investigation and strong desire to add facts to scientific knowledge." Really, Darwin got no financial or other incentives to travel on ocean expeditioin to search the 'Origin of Evolution of Species'. Among the massive documentation he did which is avaialble in 12 volumes today some are: Field notebooks, Beagle Diary, Zoological diary, geological diary, Catalouge of Specimens and many more...
Much of the popular terms attributed to Darwin are actually inherited from great scientists who worked on evolution many years before Darwin. Consider some of the cases:
A)Linnaus who founded the biological classification system for the first time said that humans have been descended from animal ancestors. (around 1735) Interestingly European Union hascome out with special issue on "Humanity-Animality" in November 'research EU' edition (http://ec.europa.eu/research/research-eu/index_en.html)
B) In certain ages due to some catostrophic event some strong specis got vanished. This observation about abrupt change was first noted by Cuvier.
C) Malthus coined term 'Struggle for Existence' who propouded 'Principle of Population'.
D) Herbert spencer has guided the explanation behind the landmark 'Survival of the Fittest'
E) Alfred Russel Wallace was his contemporary. It was after his work on Natural Selection that Darwin realised importance of his work and he started discussing it openly.
So one obvious question have to arise in our mind is what Darwin did unique so as to force coming ages to credit him for it? His meticulous observations of thousands of species with careful notes and persistence to establesh the already pronounced links between various possibilities made his work the monumental and authentic among all. (www.aboutdarwin.com)
The reasons of evolution: 1) Mutation 2) Migration 3)Genetic Drift 4) Nonrandom mating 5) Selction
All these reasons of evolution were and are still guided by Variation which means: "No two individuals of given species are alike and secondly by Culling which means: "Elimination of weaker members of community during the course of co-existence or competetition."
The evidences to study evolution: 1)Fossils 2)Anatomical studies 3)Molecular microstudies
No doubt, a rare and true icon for researchers. Experts speaking at the seminar said that it was the age when people entering into the scientific research were coming due to sheer passion of it and not due to any financial motivation or any other materialistic inspiration. As one Proffessor urged,"We should never complain about scarcity of the resources as long as we are matching the committment need from the rogorous, evidence oriented research with painstaking efforts."
It was communicated during the seminar that JNU will be hosting the International Seminar in coming September to celebrate 150 years of Theory of Evolution.
Eventually to conculde, Charles Darwin’s ideas have spread widely, but his revolution is not yet complete. (http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13059028)
