Book Origin Of Species example essay topic

Charles Robert Darwin, the grandson of the British scientist Erasmus Darwin, studied medicine at the Edinburgh University and prepared for the ministry at Cambridge. Following his abiding concentration in natural history, however, he became a naturalist and sailed in this capability on the H.M.S. Beagle from 1831 to 1838. The Beagle's voyage took Darwin to various Southern Pacific islands and to the coasts of Australia and South America. When he Returned to England, Darwin became the secretary of the Geological Society and, in 1840, published a treatise, "Zoology of the Voyage of the Beagle". At this time he met Sir Charles Lyell, who encouraged him to write about his inbreeding experiments and to expound on his theory of evolution by natural selection. Later, in 1844, Darwin received from a fellow biologist, Alfred Wallace, notes exactness a theory - parallel to, but autonomous of, his own - on natural selection.

Darwin carried on his study and, in 1858, published an essay delineating his own evolutionary theory along with Wallace's findings. The following year, The Origin of Species appeared. The book's first publication sold out in one day, stirring an instant clamor of controversy. It is still recognized as one of the most disputed yet significant works of biological study In spite of length and weighty content of Darwin's work, the text is extremely easy reading.

Early on in Darwin's first five-year expedition on the Beagle, he observed that, despite the distances between the remote areas he visited, the varieties of flora and fauna he found were analogous in structure and function. This led him to extend his idea that species were not immutable, but were forced to adapt to their ever-changing environments. In his introduction to the first version of The Origin of Species, Darwin noted: "I was much struck with certain facts in the distribution of the inhabitants of South America, and in the geological relations of the present to the past inhabitants of that continent. These facts seemed to throw some light on the origin of the species - that mystery of mysteries, as it has been called by one of our greatest philosophers". After over twenty years of additional research, Darwin published his findings. Survival of the fittest would be a good description of this book.

The book Origin of Species is renown today for its pioneering views on the ecology of plants and animals. Favorable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavorable ones to be destroyed. The result of this would be the formation of new species". Darwin gathered the mass of supporting evidence on domestic animals and plants, on variability, on sexual selection, on dispersal that swept most scientists before it.

No question this book is still today controversial. This is possibly my favorite quote in the book as it shows science has yet another major obstacle, where did we come from. Though Darwin's name was to become synonymous with the ideas of evolution and natural selection, the ideas he put forth in his 1859 book, On the Origin of Species, were both familiar and revolutionary. The transmutation of species and means of change were controversial issues long before Darwin. At the time surrounding the publication of his book, the chief exponent of evolution was Jean Baptiste Lamarck. The main objections to Lamarck's theories of evolution or, transformism, as it was known in France, were his explanations as to the process by which these improvements were achieved.

He proposed this was accomplished by two primary means: the principle of use and disuse and the concept of will. Though Lamarck did have a following, the French scientific community did not overlook the shortcomings of his theories.