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Darwin's Education
Charles Darwin attended medical school at Edinburgh University in 1825. Here Charles was taught the radical new ideas concerning continental sciences. Edinburgh at the time was a very progressive University, that allowed it's students to become free thinkers. It is here that he met his mentor Robert Edmond Grant. Together they studied invertebrates from nearby shores of the Atlantic Ocean. Through these experiences, Darwin was encouraged to ask more progressive questions concerning life. It -
Voyage on the HMS Beagle,
Darwin was invited to embark on a voyage to the Southern tip of South America. Darwin accompanied the travelers as a self-financed gentleman. Allowing him to spend extended time periods off of the Beagle to pursue his own interests. The voyage took five years to complete. During those 5 years, Darwin studied, plants, animals, and local civilizations around the world. This was the beginning of Darwin's theory of evolution. -
Darwin Gets Published
Charles Darwin's theory of evolution was published in the book, "On the Origin of Species." Darwin's theory stated that all life comes from a common ancestor. This includes plants and animals. He coined the term 'natural selection' Which means that simple organisms evolve into more complex ones with random genetic mutations, the best-suited mutations for survival are passed down while the others are not. Hence survival of the fittest.
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Conflicts between Church, Biologists, and Darwin's Science of Evolution
After Darwin published "The Origin of Species", it challenged the church's as well as how biologist's core beliefs on how all animals were created with the specific traits they have today. Instead of it taking millions of years for those traits to show up in a species. Even though later Darwin's theory was proven correct, he still was subjected to unrelenting criticism, even being depicted harshly in cartoons in his peer's publications. However, by the 1860s his theory was accepted by his peers.
