Darwin, a summary in 43 slides

DARWIN A summary in 43 slides IES LLANES History workshop.

IES LLANES History workshop We are Aníbal Ibáñez Gordillo Beatriz Fernández Santos Carlos Barrena Beltrán Emilio Beltrán Martínez Ester Benjumea Domínguez Eva María Martínez López Fco. Javier Carmona Molero Gonzalo Morales Moreno J. C. Hernández Rodríguez Marcos Ibáñez Gordillo and Marta Calderón Álvarez (Coordinator: Miguel Camacho)

Ssssh! We are going to talk about Charles Darwin.

DARWIN was born in the English town of Shrewsbury (12 th February, 1809), 200 years ago. Our greatgrandparent's grandparents time.

In that time there weren't any computers.
And tuenti didn't exist.
The mail wasn't electronic.
There were no telephones or planes.
And the ships didn't have an engine

* Darwin's family was as strange and interesting as their insects and pigeons collections. * This is his grandfather, ERASMUS DARWIN so famous as a doctor that George III, the king, invited him to be his personal doctor, but Darwin refused. *Darwin's grandfather was very critical.

What Erasmus Darwin loved more was nature and its origin, this means natural history.
In this book called ZOONOMY he defended that all living beings EVOLVED to perfection.
That idea was against the church ideas in that time.

Darwin's mother, Susana Wedgewood, was a very sensitive and religious person, and an active member of Shrewsbury's church.

Darwin said that there might be more cultured people, but his father was the smartest person he had ever known. In that inusual family environment, cultured , tolerant and free, the young Darwin grew up. His father, the doctor Robert Darwin, wasn't a religious believer at all.

Darwin's father wanted his son to be a doctor, as all the family had been, and decided to take him to his medical visits to get him used to it.
When he was 16 his father sent him to Edimburgh to study medicine .

BUT DARWIN SAID :
“ The classes at 8 AM are a nightmare”
and he added…
“ I can't bear the sight of blood”
… bad situation for someone who was going to be a doctor...

Darwin didn't study so much but…
He learnt to dissect birds with a black taxidermist who was his friend.
And he got really interested in biology and wildlife.

The young Darwin
Darwin wasn't a good student, but he was extremely interested in nature, plants and animals… and in his collections.

In reference to his studies...
He didn't do very well, but he used to go to the Scientific Society’s meetings.
And when he was 18, he gave his first lecture about leech larvae.

In the end he gave up medicine.
His father conviced him to study to be a vicar. Charles Darwin believed in God and being a vicar was a very respectable job that might allow him some time to be able to investigate.
Charles went to live in the country and he dedicated part of his time hunting and studying the Natural History.

And he went to Cambridge:
He was going to study to be a vicar for the anglican church.
At that time most teachers preferred religion
to science or new ideas.

He met Henslow (His professor of Botany)
The theology classes were usually boring, so on Fridays he attended Henslow´ s classes that were quite different. As a teacher, both in the classroom and in the field, he was eminently successful
Henslow was an inquiring scientist at heart and did things such as looking after a botanical garden in Cambridge or improving agriculture and farming by teaching the villagers.

Henslow was the person who invited Darwin to participate on the trip around the world on the H.M.S. Beagle. From 1831 to 1836 Darwin served as naturalist aboard the H.M.S. Beagle on a British science expedition around the world.
He was 22 years old.
Unfortunately 3 of the 5 years, he had to be inland (He got very ill on the ship)
He dedicated that time to think, write and pick up more plants, minerals and animals.

Galápagos Islands
Darwin was fascinated in particular by the land tortoises and marine iguanas in the Galápagos. Giant tortoises varied in predictable ways from one island to another.
The shape of a tortoise's shell could be used to identify which island a particular tortoise inhabited.
He observed much variation in related or similar species of plants and animals that were geographically isolated from each other.
These observations were the basis for his ideas.

In the Galápagos he also observed the small differences between the species of the finches.
He observed earthquakes, fossils or shells at sea level, even coral islands that had sunk.
Darwin agreed with Lyell: the world is formed by gradual changes, sometimes sudden, about a permanent change.

In his house in 1836 Darwin ordered and classified his collection because Henslow guided all his research,

He gave conferences about fossils and reefs and he had scientific meetings with his friends Lyell, Owen, Henslow…
He wrote a report about the coral islands.

In 1837 Darwin started writing his “Diary of a voyage on the Beagle”. It was the best well known voyage book in the 19th century .

That year Gould told Darwin that the finches that Darwin had given him from three different islands of the Galapagos, belonged to three different species.
So they were not three varieties of the same species, as Darwin thought.

And he concluded
that a new species can evolve if that species is isolated from its own species.
Then if the three species of finches from the Galapago islands come from a common ancestor…
all the finches of America come from a common species Hypothesis: Separate species may have arose from an original ancestor

IT is the EVOLUTION tree . Species alive today descended with modification from species that lived in the past. All organisms on earth are united into a single family tree of life by common descent And so on……..

Darwin read Malthus, who considered that human beings will grow in a geometrical progression while the food grows in aritmethical progression. In the end there will be more people than food. And the excess of people will be reduced due to famine, diseases or wars. Darwin was surprised with the ideas of Malthus, because he saw the big force of nature. A lot of creatures multiply in great amounts, but only a few survive.

Reflections
Observation 1: Organisms generally have more offspring than can survive to adulthood.
Observation 2: Offspring are not identical. There is variation in their appearance, size, and other characteristics.
Inference: Those organisms that are better adapted to their environment have a greater likelihood of surviving to adulthood and passing these characteristics on to their offspring.
Survival of the “fittest

This can be applied to all living beings: When there are bad conditions only those who adapt better are able to survive. For example, in a bird community not all of them are equal, those ones with a harder beak, and those who are more able to change their diet and eat seeds, will survive better and will reproduce more, and transmit that ability to their offspring.
“ I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term Natural Selection.”
— Charles Darwin from "The Origin of Species“, 1859
This is the evolution mechanism.

Aged 30, Darwin married his cousin, Emma.
They had 10 children and lived happily in their house near Kent county.
Emma was very o religious and asked Darwin in a letter to consider changing his vision about against creationism.
Darwin didn't accept but he cried each time he saw the letter.

In 1844 he wrote to his wife:
“ I have just finished the sketch of the species theory. Please, publish it if I die ”.
And he wrote to a botanist friend, Hooker: ” I am watching the light coming and I' m convinced (disagreeing with my initial thinking) that the species are not... unchangeable”
Only his scientific colleagues knew a part of his work that still took 15 years to be finished and published

Darwin was hesitant to publish his theories because of the violent reactions that previous authors had received.
He wanted that time and that energy to continue investigating, storing more data, and researching.
Another disadvantage was an illness he had been suffering since he got back to Britain: he suffered from frequent headaches, vomiting, shivers and convulsions.

But in 1858 the naturalist Wallace ,from Malayo islands sent him a paper with the main elements of Darwin's theory.
Wallace asked Darwin to read it, to know if he agreed with it to publish it.
Wallace had discovered Darwin's secret!
Darwin, with a strong sense of honour, arranged for a simultaneous reading of his and Wallace’s papers before the Linnean Society.
The readings were met with silence, so Darwin published the full text of his ideas.
… then it hit the fan.

Darwin wrote a new version of his book “Origin of the species”
It was published in 1859, and became “ the book that revolutionized the world”
The first day all the books were sold. There were crowds of people waiting for the coming of more books.
In Darwin’s lifetime he would be recognized as one of the great masters of science. By the 1870s almost all serious scientists in England had accepted evolution.
It was translated into 30 languages but it didn't come to Spain until 1877, but its controversy arrived much sooner.

Wallace was very elegant: he accepted Darwin's supremacy and he called “darwinism” the new theory. In the 20th century, advances in palaeontology and genetics reinforced and completed the original theory . It's the current Theory of Neodarwinism. “ Nothing has any sense in biology if it is not considered under the eyes of evolution ". T. Dobzhansky

Darwin was responsible for a very clear difference between society before and after his book's publications. Fights between evolutionists and creationists had started. Some people said church couldn't agree with the evolutionism and believe in God at the same time.

In those times, almost everyone, the “Official Science” included, thought that the world was like God had made it the day of CREATION, just 6,000 years ago!
Today we know that the Earth is 4600 million years old.
Nowadays fundamentalist religious societies still think in a similar way and try to attack evolutionism with a false science, known as Intelligent Design , a modern creationism .

Some radical evolutionists have defended the natural selection and the survival of the fittest to explain the domination of some men above others. This is called Social Darwinism and those who defend it say: “ If natural selection works with the wildlife why not in society?” This wasn't Charles Darwin's idea.

Although his work caused a great controversy , Darwin didn't stop receiving honours and distinctions until his death in 1882, aged 73.
He was buried in Westminster Abbey, next to Isaac Newton’s memorial.
It is the maximun honour that an Englishman can receive after his death.
Nowadays museums, libraries and universities all over the world have his name.

Today we celebrate 200 YEARS of that THEORY which is so important for science. Happily and without any dogma.

THE IES LLANES HISTORY WORKSHOP DEDICATES THIS WORK TO THE TEACHERS: MANUEL F. BORDAS and VIDAL BÁÑEZ 2009 Charles Darwin's Bicentenary

Darwin, a summary in 43 slides

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