by The creation of the Earth was, in majority, believed to have been through divine power, or through God’s action. As the people believed, the Bible described how the heavens and the earth, the light and the skies, were all made by the word of an all powerful creator. This was a fundamental belief that all people could understand the concept of, unlike many other fields of science where the average citizen may not grasp the theory. For example, the other revolutions mentioned in this class such as the Scientific, or maybe the Industrial, were movements in science and technology that, while impacting the world, did not necessarily impact each individual’s notion on life. And that was why Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species had the most impact on the collective mind in my opinion.
The concept of evolution in Darwin’s book focused on several ideas. Darwin knew that the only things keeping a population from growing infinitely was the limitation of natural resources. So then, what decided who got said resources? Competition is the obvious outcome, as a species wouldn’t just roll over and die since others existed to compete for survival. This is where natural selection comes into play, or the idea that the organisms with the most advantageous traits would be more likely to survive, and consequently reproduce with said advantageous traits. The ones without such preferable traits would subsequently die out leading to the prosperity of the fittest. Darwin’s book also went over the many criticisms and complaints about his theory on evolution. An example would be of the fossil record, which did not exist at the time to fully support Darwin’s theory. His rebuttal was that such fossils could either be yet to found or already destroyed by the elements or such.
Most people simply believed that humans were the chosen ones, the ones that were made in God’s own image. The arrival of Darwin’s Origin of Species shattered that perception. His book was not mean to be provocative, in fact he considered it to be diplomatic in regards to human evolution. It was focused on the variation of traits in different species of organisms, and how these variations were not the will of a higher power but derived from natural selection. This was all a very new take on things, not to say that Darwin alone created the concept of evolution. But his work was one of the most compelling to contribute to the idea that evolution was a gradual process formed by the necessity of certain traits to better survive. It was a huge groundbreaker in understanding evolution and history, and was quite different from the typical “experiment and theorize” style of scientific work in that it was now a historical and observational method. To refer back to a past unit, CP Snow’s essay on the divide between humanities and science would appreciate the concept of Darwin’s Origin of Species. The connection between evolution, the need to observe and study nature, and the conceptualization of natural selection blend the philosophical nature of humanities with the evidence and theorizing of science nicely.