Biografia De Charles Darwin

He born in a family of doctors. After he had renounced his studies of medicine, Charles Darwin went to the University of Cambridge to be a Anglican priest. But, in 1831, he started a long journey offive years around world, in South America and in the Pacific Islands, as naturalist on the research ship "Beagle". During this period, he collected an enormous quantity of biological and geologicalobservations. The natural phenomena he noted (distribution of fossils) persuaded him that the only creation cannot explain them and that animal and plant species are not immutable.

Established inLondon, Charles Darwin published the account of his journey, "Voyage of the Beagle" (1839), and started to exploit the mass of data he brought back from it. In 1843, he settled definitively in Downe, inthe still of the London country, to keep on with his research. He took an interest in Malthus and in the practices of selection used by the stockbreeders.

By analogy with the artificialselection, Charles Darwin discovered the mechanism of the natural selection. The individuals of a species who are the best adapted to their environment survive, reproduce; the others disappear. That way, onlythe variations that are useful for species are transmitted by an individual to its descendants. These new characteristics become thus gradually dominant. Consequently species are not fixed, as it wasuntil then believed in coherence with the Bible. The main point of the Darwin’s theory is exposed in "Origins of Species" (1859), in which the general evolution and the principles of selection aredescribed, and in "The Descent of Man" (1871). It is necessary to specify that only the modern genetics, which developed starting from work of Mendel (1822-1884), has validated the theory of Darwin andhas explained the transmission modes of the hereditary characters.

Karl Marx (1818-1883) was one of the first philosophers to become aware of the importance of the Darwin’s works. According to...