Charles Darwin: The Life of a Revolutionary Thinker

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Recommended: Theory of evolution - Charles Darwin’s ideas of natural selection

Charles Darwin, who is Charles Darwin? Darwin was not the father of genetics like Mendel; although he contributed at it. He had a hard childhood and a hard time in school. Despite all of that he was different he like to observe and collect things. He never knew that his observation would cause an enormous change in the way we looked at the world.

When he was about 8 ½ or maybe 9 years his mother died because of cancer or maybe an ulcer. Sometime before that he started school but then at the age of nine he went to what he thought was a public school but it was really a private boarding school. The rooms were disgusting and they had to learn Latin or Greek literature and language ,he failed. He only liked science. Since he didn’t make many improvements in that school his father put him into another school and even selected the lectures he had to attend. His father wanted him to pursue the medical field but Charles didn’t. He wanted to go into the science field. In the summer his father wanted him to work with him, he even gave Charles his own patients.

Then after a few years into medicine he didn’t want to practice it anymore. His father was enraged with anger at Charles. He then went to Cambridge University where he got his bachelor’s Degree in medicine. In Cambridge he liked to collect many rare specimens like beetles. He was interested in natural science and he signed up with a man named Henslow that studied with him. In a short period of time he received a letter that he would be able to study on an Island aboard a ship called the Beagle.

Charles wanted to go but his father quickly objected, so he turned to his uncle that tried to get his father to agree with the trip. They did that by making a list of his objectio...

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... finding that stirred the way people looked at species. Many people were skeptical about it because it would mean they came from animals like monkeys and whales. They made fun of him but in the end it made sense. Evolution isn’t a relatively new theory and we understand it so there shouldn’t be a need for more work on it because it is complete.

So as you can see Charles Darwin did change the way you can look at the world. I think his discoveries were important and if he hadn’t taken the trip and listened to his father we may have not known anything about evolution and its existence. We wouldn’t know that evolution is when a specimen or organism changes overtime due to the environmental changes or mutations. We wouldn’t even know about natural selection. We would believe a theory that made no logical sense. Therefore Charles Darwin was a great revolutionary thinker.

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