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本帖最后由 ngsunyu 于 2022-7-3 09:27 编辑
查尔斯·罗伯特·达尔文 (英語:Charles Robert Darwin,1809年2月12日-1882年4月19日)英国博物學家、地質學家和生物學家,其最著名的研究成果是天擇演化,解釋了適應的來源,並指出他认为所有物種都是从少數共同祖先演化而来的。到了19世纪30年代,达尔文的理論成為對演化機制的主要詮釋,並成為現代演化思想的基礎,在科學上可對生物多樣性進行一致且合理的解釋,是現今生物學的基石。(zh.wikipedia.org/查尔斯·达尔文)
English naturalist Charles Darwin developed the theory of evolution by natural selection, which became the foundation of modern evolutionary studies. An affable country gentleman, Darwin at first shocked religious Victorian society by suggesting that animals and humans shared a common ancestry. However, his nonreligious biology appealed to the rising class of professional scientists, and by the time of his death evolutionary imagery had spread through all of science, literature, and politics. Darwin, himself an agnostic, was accorded the ultimate British accolade of burial in Westminster Abbey, London. Darwin formulated his bold theory in private in 1837–39, after returning from a voyage around the world aboard HMS Beagle, but it was not until two decades later that he finally gave it full public expression in On the Origin of Species (1859), a book that has deeply influenced modern Western society and thought.
The Beagle Voyage
Darwin embarked on the Beagle voyage on Dec. 27, 1831. The circumnavigation of the globe would be the making of Darwin. Five years of physical hardship and mental rigour, imprisoned within a ship’s walls, offset by wide-open opportunities in the Brazilian jungles and the Andes Mountains, were to give Darwin a new seriousness. As a gentleman naturalist, he could leave the ship for extended periods, pursuing his own interests. As a result, he spent only 18 months of the voyage aboard the ship. Among the places Darwin visited on the voyage were the Cape Verde Islands, coastal regions of Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina, and the Galapagos Islands.
On the last leg of the voyage Darwin finished his 770-page diary, wrapped up 1,750 pages of notes, drew up 12 catalogs of his 5,436 skins, bones, and carcasses—and still he wondered: Was each Galapagos mockingbird a naturally produced variety? Why did ground sloths become extinct? He sailed home with problems enough to last him a lifetime.
Evolution by Natural Selection
Following the voyage, Darwin became well known through his diary’s publication as Journal of Researches into the Geology and Natural History of the Various Countries Visited by H.M.S. Beagle (1839). He also employed the best experts and published their descriptions of his specimens in his Zoology of the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle (1838–43). Darwin drafted a 35-page sketch of his theory of natural selection in 1842 and expanded it in 1844, but he had no immediate intention of publishing it. In 1842, Darwin, increasingly shunning society, had moved his family to the isolated village of Downe, in Kent, at the “extreme edge of [the] world.” (It was in fact only 16 miles [26 km] from central London.)
From 1846 to 1854, Darwin added to his credibility as an expert on species by pursuing a detailed study of all known barnacles. Intrigued by their sexual differentiation, he discovered that some females had tiny degenerate males clinging to them. This sparked his interest in the evolution of diverging male and female forms from an original hermaphrodite creature. Four monographs on such an obscure group made him a world expert. No longer could he be dismissed as a speculator on biological matters.
On the Origin of Species
In the 1850s the changing social composition of science in England—typified by the rise of the freethinking biologist Thomas Henry Huxley—promised that Darwin’s work would be well-received. Huxley, the philosopher Herbert Spencer, and other outsiders were opting for a secular nature in the rationalist Westminster Review and deriding the influence of “parsondom” (the influence of the church). Darwin had himself lost the last shreds of his belief in Christianity with the tragic death of his oldest daughter, Annie, from typhoid in 1851.
In 1854 Darwin solved his last major problem, the forking of genera to produce new evolutionary branches. He used an industrial analogy familiar from the Wedgwood factories, the division of labour: competition in nature’s overcrowded marketplace would favour variants that could exploit different aspects of a niche. Species would diverge on the spot, like tradesmen in the same tenement.
In 1856 Darwin began writing a triple-volume book, tentatively called Natural Selection. Whereas in the 1830s Darwin had thought that species remained perfectly adapted until the environment changed, he now believed that every new variation was imperfect, and that perpetual struggle was the rule. He also explained the evolution of sterile worker bees in 1857. These could not be selected because they did not breed, so he opted for “family” selection (kin selection, as it is known today): the whole colony benefited from their retention.
Darwin had finished a quarter of a million words by June 18, 1858. That day he received a letter from Alfred Russel Wallace, an English socialist and specimen collector working in the Malay Archipelago, sketching a similar-looking theory. Darwin, fearing loss of priority, accepted a solution proposed by geologist Sir Charles Lyell and botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker: joint extracts from Darwin’s and Wallace’s works would be read at the Linnean Society on July 1, 1858. Darwin was away, sick, grieving for his tiny son who had died from scarlet fever, and thus he missed the first public presentation of the theory of natural selection.
Darwin hastily began an “abstract” of Natural Selection, which grew into a more accessible book, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. Suffering from a terrible bout of nausea, Darwin, now 50, was secreted away at a spa on the desolate Yorkshire moors when the book was sold to the trade on Nov. 22, 1859. He still feared the worst. The book did distress his Cambridge patrons, but they were marginal to science now. However, radical Dissenters were sympathetic, as were the rising London biologists and geologists, even if few actually adopted Darwin’s cost-benefit approach to nature. The newspapers drew the one conclusion that
Darwin had specifically
avoided: that humans
had evolved from apes,
and that Darwin was
denying mankind’s
immortality. A sensitive
Darwin, making no
personal appearances,
let Huxley, by now a
good friend, manage
this part of the debate.
The pugnacious Huxley,
who loved public argument as much as
Darwin loathed it, had
his own reasons for tak
ing up the cause, and
did so with enthusiasm.
He wrote three reviews
of Origin of Species,
defended human evolu
tion at the Oxford
meeting of the British
Association for the
Advancement of Science
in 1860 (when Bishop
Samuel Wilber force jokingly asked whether the apes were on Huxley’s grandmother’s or grandfather’s side), and published his own book on human evolution, Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature (1863). What Huxley championed was Darwin’s evolutionary naturalism, his nonmiraculous assumptions, which pushed biological science into previously taboo areas and increased the power of Huxley’s professionals.
Huxley’s reaction, with its enthusiasm for evolution and cooler opinion of natural selection, was typical. Natural selection received little support in Darwin’s day. By contrast, evolution itself (“descent,” Darwin called it— the word evolution would only be introduced in the last, 1872, edition of the Origin) was being acknowledged from British Association platforms by 1866.
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