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  • Essay / Darwin's Theory of Evolution - 516

    “On the origin of species by means of natural selection, or on the preservation of favored races in the struggle for life”, usually abbreviated to “the origin of species", is the full title of Charles Darwin's work. book, first published in 1859, in which Darwin formalized what we know today as the theory of evolution. Although Darwin is the most famous exponent of this theory, he was by no means the first to suspect how evolution works. In fact, Charles owed a considerable debt to his grandfather Erasmus, a leading scientist and intellectual, who published a paper in 1794 titled Zoonomia, or the Laws of Organic Life. This realizes many of the ideas his grandson developed 70 years later. However, it was Darwin who formalized the theory and presented the most convincing arguments in favor of this theory. Charles Darwin was born on February 12, 1809 (incidentally, the same day and year as Abraham Lincoln), in Shrewsbury, England. He had a privileged upbringing and loved science, particularly biology. He graduated from Cambridge University in 1831, and on December 27 of that year he set off on a five-year voyage aboard the Beagle, a ship bound for South America. His journey was long and eventful, notably once, in Chile, where he encountered both an earthquake and a tidal wave in a single day! He spent the entire voyage seasick, but became interested in naturalism and began thinking about evolution. Using the evidence he found during his tour of South America to support the basic theories established by his predecessors, and making his own adjustments and discoveries. Finally, the Beagle arrived home on October 2, 1836. During his travels, Darwin kept five notebooks, marked A through E, in which he noted what he found, made sketches, and wrote down his observations and theories. These later became the basis of his book, although in a "condensed and corrected" version, to "make the volume more suitable for popular reading", as Charles stated in the preface to