…Darwin’s own account suggests that in part he owed the inspiration for his theory to reading T.R. Malthus’s Essay on Population which was written in 1798, though the dates in Darwin’s journal throw some doubt on this. Malthus’s essay purports to show that population growth will always tend to outrun food supply unless checked by war, famine, or disease. Malthus’s principle could obviously be extended in an evolutionary direction by concentrating on the struggle for existence and the question of why some survived rather than others. Seven years before the publication of the Origin, Herbert Spencer had already given Malthus such an interpretation in his brief essay on “The Theory of Population,” but he applied it only to human beings, not to problems of species as such.
—As far as intelligence is concerned, I don’t know of any evidence that Darwin was above average.
The reason why anyone today has heard of Darwin is because of a tragedy which occurred in 1851 – Darwin’s ten year old daughter Anne died. Darwin until then had been basically a liberal Protestant. After this tragedy, the most painful in Darwin’s life, he came to hate God. “What a book a Devil’s chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low & horridly cruel works of nature!” he would write in 1856. At last, in 1859, Darwin published the Origin of Species, the first book ever published by someone with real scientific credentials which suggested (although he still dared not state it explicitly) that life could, in essence, just create itself, no God needed.—Read More:http://www.torahphilosophy.com/2011/03/messiah-of-science-charles-darwin-was.html
Darwin was stillplanning a much longer work than The Origin of Species was in fact to be, when his hand was forced by the dramatic coincidence of the arrival of a paper from Alfred Russell Wallace in which the theory of natural selection was clearly set out. Darwin, in anguish, remarked, ” I would far rather burn muy whole book than that he or any other man should think I had behaved in a paltry spirit.” But Darwin’s priority was acknowledged, and the presentation of the Darwin-Wallace thesis as a joint paper to the Linnaean Society on July 1, 1858, was one of the most unsordid episodes in the history of science.
—Charles Darwin was the founder of a popular modern religion known as atheism. While it is true that atheists existed before Darwin, however Darwin made atheism respectable and popular. Richard Dawkins has written “atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist”.
—Read More:http://www.torahphilosophy.com/2011/03/messiah-of-science-charles-darwin-was.html
It was more than twenty years since Darwin had begun his first notebook on “The Transmutation of Species.” The Linnaean Society paper caused little stir; not so the publication in the following year of The Origin of Species. The “murder” Darwin had confessed to Joseph Dalton Hooker fifteen years earlier was out. ( to be continued)…
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