The Voyage- In 1832, a British exploration ship named HMS Beagle, on its expedition trip round the globe, came to a dense forest in the eastern coast of South America. Amongst the crew was a young Englishman in the post of a naturalist named Charles Darwin. He was hardly 24 years of age by that time. He stepped out to the virgin land to hunt for new kinds of flora and fauna. In a single day, he was able to collect as many as 13 different species of small beetles! He was astonished to find such a large variety of a single species.
The Fascinating Finches
During the next three years, the ship sailed into the Pacific in the west and reached a desolated archipelago named Galapagos, nearly 1000 kilometers away from the mainland. Galapagos was known for its unique diversity of birds and animals species. A sparrow sized bird in particular, the finch, attracted Darwin’s attention. He was fascinated to see as many as 13 different species of finches supposed to be the natives of the South American mainland. Although the finches bore close resemblances to one another, there were, however, minute variations in their physical appearances especially in the construction of bills. While some ground feeding types had a range of gill sizes related to the size of seeds they foraged for on the soil surface, other finches occupied the canopy and feed upon fleshy fruits and insects. The Woodpecker Finch, in particular, impressed Darwin with its strange hunting habit. It used the twigs or cactus spines as tools to probe and extricate insects hiding in crevices.
Adaptation: the Key to Survival
Such a large diversity of finches evoked the old curiosity in young Darwin’s mind that laid dormant since a long time. He tried his best to account for this phenomenon. He was convinced that the intimately close looking finches were not actually different birds, but variations of an original species that once migrated from the South American mainland. The immigrant finches adopted different islands as their new homes and got adapted to the local conditions. Over many generations of time, they automatically changed into ways that allowed them to get enough food and exploit the resources of the islands to their fullest advantage.
The Theory of Natural Selection
On the completion of the five years voyage Darwin returned home and started to substantiate his observations into a consistent theory. It took as long as 20 years to publish his theory into a book entitled ‘On the Origin of Species by Natural Selection’ in the year 1859. In it, he suggested that the environmental changes forced the animals to adapt to new conditions. This resulted in new variations in their physical characteristics. Only favourable variations that best fit to the nature’s requirements were preserved and propagated. Those species survived and grew. Other species were rejected by the nature and eventually died. Thus he was able to explain the process of evolution of life on the earth.
The Book That Changed the World
This was totally a revolutionary idea, hitherto unheard and unknown. As this contradicted to the prevalent doctrine of the church (because the contemporary view was that all forms of life were uniquely created by God) they vehemently condemned it. Despite all these oppositions, Darwin’s book was highly appreciated worldwide and in no time became a best seller. Within 13 years of its publication, it ran through 6 editions.
Charles Darwin was born on 12th February, 1809 in England. The year 2009 marks the 200th year of Darwin’s birth and 150th anniversary of the publication of his masterpiece book ‘Origin of species’ that changed the world.