TOPIC: EVOLUTION THEORY OF CHARLES DARWIN

II. TABLE OF CONTENTS

CONTENT PAGE
Title Page ……………………………………………. 1
Table of Contents ……………………………………. 2
Introduction …………………………………………… 3
Topic Discussions ……………………………………. 3
Conclusions ……………………………………. 8
Recommendations ……………………………………. 8
References ……………………………………………. 8
Resume ……………………………………………. 9

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III. INTRODUCTION

The topic that I discussed is about the life of Charles Darwin and his contribution to the
world of Science and Philosophy. As we all know, Charles Darwin is the proponent of the theory
of evolution where it says that humans came from an ape-like ancestor. But the story behind his
theory is still unknown for most people especially to those who are not related or engaged in the
field of science and philosophy.
Every modern evolutionist turns to Darwin again and again. As Mayr (1991) said, this is
not surprising since the roots of all our evolutionary thinking go back to Darwin. Even though his
writings and ideas are still controversial up to the present day, still, we can’t ignore the fact that
his original works and writings show that Darwin frequently understood things clearly than his
supporters or even his opponents.
I am not a fanatic nor Darwin’s apologist. When I first heard his name in high school during
our biology class, I don’t appreciate his theory of evolution. For me, only an atheist will entertain
his ideas of how man descended from a primate ancestor.
But my interest in Darwin’s thought arose when I was assigned to do this report in
Philosophy of Man regarding his views of man. I started to consider his ideas and point of view
and even did deeper thinking regarding his why’s and if’s like – “if God created the world perfectly
then why did he allowed disasters and chaos to ruin the world? Why there is slavery? Why there
is extinction? Did God just waste His creations for nothing?” Upon reading some of those books
pertaining to Darwin, I came to realized that he has all the bases to claim about his theories of
natural selection and evolution.
Understanding and appreciating Darwin’s thoughts doesn’t mean that I am turning back
from being a Christian and believer of the Holy Trinity. I am just amazed at how he managed
everything to come up with such theories that ended the traditional anthropocentrism of the Bible
and of other philosophers prior to his time.

IV. TOPIC DISCUSSION

The Life of Charles Darwin

Charles Darwin was born on February 12, 1809, at Shrewsbury, England. The 5th of 6
children and the second son of Dr. Robert Darwin, a successful physician. His grandfather was
Erasmus Darwin, the father of Zoonomia, a work which anticipated his grandson’s evolutionary
interests by attempting to explain organic life according to evolutionary principles. His mother,
the daughter of Josiah Wedgwood, the celebrated potter died when he was eight years old.
Charles Darwin was born a naturalist. Every aspect of nature intrigued him. He finds it
boring to stay in a traditional school. When his father noticed that Charles didn’t enjoy being in
his current school, he sent him to University of Edinburgh to study medicine like his older brother
before he turned seventeen. But Darwin realized that medicine was not for him. So, his father sent
him to Cambridge to study Theology. This seemed to be a reasonable choice because all naturalist
in England at that time were ordained ministers. In Cambridge, Darwin devoted himself in
collecting beetles, discussing botany and geology with his professors.

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 After his studies, he spent most of his time travelling in different places. He became part
of the Beagle Voyage for five years. The primary motive of the voyage was to chart the coast of
South America. A secondary motive was scientific exploration. He spent those years in visiting
places like volcanic and coral islands, tropical forests in Brazil, the vast pampas of Patagonia, a
crossing of Andes from Chile to Tucuman in Argentina and much more. He collected specimen of
widely different groups of organisms, he dug out important fossils in Patagonia and devoted much
of his time in geology, but most of all he observed aspects of nature and asked himself innumerable
questions as to the how and why of natural processes. He asked ‘why’ questions not only in
geology but also in political and social situations. And it was his ability to ask profound questions
and his perseverance in trying to answer them that would eventually make Darwin a great scientist.
When Darwin boarded the Beagle, he still believed in the fixity of species, but it was his
visit in Galapagos in September to October 1835 that provided him with crucial evidence. It was
an observation he made on the birds of the Galapagos Islands that led him to the branching theory.
Darwin knew that there was only one species of mockingbird in South America, but he found a
species of mockingbird on each of three islands in the Galapagos, with each species different from
the others. He concluded quite rightly that a single colonization of the South American
mockingbird had given rise, by branching descent, to three different species on three different
islands in the Galapagos. Then, he further reasoned that probably all mockingbirds in the world
had descended from a common ancestor, because they are basically so similar to each other.
Mockingbirds and their relatives, like thrashers and catbirds, then presumably also had a common
ancestor. This chain of inferences led Darwin to the conclusion that all organisms on Earth had
common ancestors and that probably all life on Earth had started with a single origin of life (Mayr,
2001).
In January 1839, Darwin married his cousin Emma Wedgewood and in September 1842,
the young couple moved from London to a country house in a small village of Down where Darwin
lived until he died on April 19, 1882.

Confronting the Creationist: The First Darwinian Revolution

Theories that either implied or overtly assumed organic evolution were largely ignored or
actively resisted by other naturalists. All his teachers and classmates firmly believed that all species
do not change and strongly believed on the dogma of the bible about the story of creation and that
all species are created of God’s hands.

The Argument Against Creationism

When Darwin decided in 1827 to study for the ministry, he too was an Orthodox Christian.
He did not doubt the words in the Bible and didn’t not even question the occurrence of miracles
nor any other natural phenomena. When he sailed on the Beagle, he reportedly uttered that he was
an orthodox and he can still remember some occurrences where he was being laughed at by some
of the officers for quoting the Bible as an unanswerable authority on some point of morality
(Barzun, 1958). And during his five years of voyage, raised the first doubt in his mind about his
religious beliefs. How could a wise and good creator permit the unspeakable cruelty and sufferings
of slavery? How could he instigate earthquakes and volcanic eruptions that killed thousands or

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tens of thousands of innocent people? Yet, Darwin was far too busy with his work to become
obsessed by such disturbing thoughts.
After his return from the Beagle, Darwin was more strongly influenced by his family’s
beliefs than by his Cambridge friends. Most of his family members were atheists. His grandfather
Erasmus, quite able to believe in evolution. This is where Charles Darwin got the idea for the
evolution of man. His father Robert who used to be a physician was an unbeliever of God while
his uncle, Josiah Wedgewood was a unitarian (do not believe in the Holy Trinity). Charles’ older
brother Erasmus become an unbeliever too by the time Charles return from his Beagle voyage.
But a more important influence on changing his beliefs than his intellectual surroundings
was Darwin’s own scientific findings. Almost everything he learned in his natural-history studies
was against Christian dogma. Every species has numerous adaptations, from species-specific songs
or courtships to specialized food and specific enemies.
Darwin’s observations were also in conflict with the natural theologians’ belief in a perfect
world. He finds numerous imperfections. How could all the species in former periods become
extinct if they have been perfect? As Hull (1973) has said rightly, “The God implied by… a
realistic appraisal of the organic world was capricious, cruel, arbitrary, wasteful, careless, and
totally unconcerned with the welfare of his creations.” Such consideration as these gradually drove
Darwin to the decision to try to explain the world without invoking God or natural phenomena.
But, in 1851, an event occurred in Darwin’s life that thoroughly affected him. He lost his
beloved ten-year-old daughter Annie. As Moore (1989) describes, this ‘cruel’ event seems to have
extinguished the last traces of theism in Darwin.
For Darwin horizontal thinking, about speciation permitted the solution of three important
evolutionary problems: (1) why and how species multiply; (2) why there are discontinuities
between major groups of organisms in nature, when the concept of gradual evolution would seem
to imply countless subtle gradations between all groups; (3) and how higher taxa could evolve.
But perhaps the most decisive consequence of the discovery of geographic speciation was that it
led Darwin automatically to a branching concept of evolution.

The Theory of Common Descent

The case of the species of Galapagos mockingbirds provided Darwin with an additional
important new insight. The three species had clearly descended from a single ancestral species on
the South American continent. Apparently very soon after Darwin understood that a single species
from South American mockingbird had given rise to three daughter species in Galapagos Islands,
he seemed to realize that such a process of multiplication of species, combined with their
continuing divergence, could in due time give rise to different genera and still higher categories.
Darwin penned some thoughts that all plants and animals have descended from one form,
into which life was first breathed. Humans must have evolved from an ape-liked ancestor. This
was the end of the traditional anthropocentrism of the Bible and of the philosophers.
This application of the theory of the Common Descent to humans, however, encountered
vigorous opposition. No Darwinian idea was less acceptable to the Victorians than the derivation
of man from a primate ancestor.

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Darwin’s Theory of Evolution
This famous Theory of Evolution by Charles Darwin was actually a collective theory. It
consists of five theories which are interconnected with each other:
1. Evolution as such – the world is not constant nor recently created nor perpetually cycling
but rather is steadily changing and that organisms are transformed in time.
2. Common descent – every group of organisms descended from a common ancestor and
that all groups of organisms, including plants, animals, and microorganisms ultimately go
back to a single origin of life on earth.
3. Multiplication of species – explains the origin of the enormous organic diversity. It
postulates that organisms multiply, either by splitting into daughter species or by ‘budding’.
4. Gradualism – evolutionary change takes place through the gradual change of the
population and not by the sudden production of new individuals that represent a new type.
5. Natural selection – evolutionary change comes about through the abundant production of
genetic variation in every generation.
Since Charles Darwin was the most talked about person of the 1860s, Huxley, always a
coiner of felicitous phrases, soon referred to Darwin’s ideas as “Darwinism.”

Darwinism as Part of Philosophical Views

There is no particular definition or interpretation of Darwinism. But some philosophers,

gave their interpretation as follows:

1. Darwinism as “Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. This definition is still questionable.

Which one is meant since Darwin had so many theories of evolution? Should the term refer
to the totality of Darwin’s theories, including those of pangenes, the effect of use and
disuse, blending inheritance, and the frequency of sympatric speciation? Therefore, there
is no clarity in this.
2. Darwinism as Evolutionism. Evolutionism was a concept alien to the physicists, not only
owing to its rejection of essentialism but also for its acceptance of the historical element.
Historical inferences were alien to all philosophers coming from logic or mathematics. It
was Darwin who made evolutionary thinking a respectable concept of science.
3. Darwinism as Anticreationism. This is the Darwinism which denied the constancy of
species and in particular, special creation, that is, the separate creation of every feature in
the inanimate and living world.
4. Darwinism as Anti-Ideology. Not only natural selection but also many other aspects of
Darwin’s paradigm were in complete opposition to many of the dominant ideologies of the
mid-nineteenth century. Some contrasting ideologies were essentialism (typology),
physicalism (reductionism), and finalism (teleology).
5. Darwinism as Selectionism. Almost modern biologist, when asked what the term
Darwinism stands for, will answer that it stands for a belief in the importance of natural
selection in evolution.

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 6. Darwinism as Variational Evolution. Darwin’s concept of evolution was radically
different from the transformational and the saltation concepts of evolution that had
previously been proposed.
7. Darwinism as the Creed of the Darwinians. This choice of defining Darwinism is more
often favored by philosophers and historians than by biologists. This concept claimed that
there are no Darwinian tenets that characterize all the Darwinians. According to Hull, it
was not sufficient for a person to hold certain Darwinian ideas to be called a Darwinian.
But for Mayr (1991), this is an error. He stated that there is indeed one belief that all true
original Darwinians held in common, and that was their rejection of creationism, their
rejection of special creation. The conviction that the diversity of the natural world was the
result of natural processes and not the work of God was the idea that brought all the so-
called Darwinians together despite their disagreements on other of Darwin’s theories and
despite the retentions of them.
8. Darwinism as a New World View. Some philosophers suggests that henceforth “the word
“Darwinism should be used to designate a worldview that seems to have been arrived at
more or less independently by Spencer, Darwin, Huxley, and Wallace in the 1850s and
early 1860s. So, for them, this is the most useless definition of Darwinism because he can’t
solely embrace the title of being the new world view since this is almost similar to other
mentioned philosophers.
9. Darwinism as a New Methodology. In view of this, most philosophers are confused if
what Darwin’s method of science was, and what was new with it. They are still in doubt if
this is a hypothetico-deductive (Ghiselin, 1969), or did it follow various another scheme?
Almost any modern philosopher of science has suggested a somewhat different Darwinian
methodology. It’s still confusing for most philosopher if Darwin is using a semantic
approach or inductive approach.
So, with all these definitions and interpretations, we can view the Pluralism of Darwinism.
It is clear that no simple answer can be given to the question “What is Darwinism?” The majority
of the nine meanings of the term Darwinism discussed earlier are clearly either misleading or
unrepresentative of Darwin’s thought.

Why Did Darwinism Face Uphill Battle in His Proposed Theory?

Many people oppose Darwin’s theory because he challenged some of the basic belief of his age.
Four of them were part of Christian dogma.
1. A belief in a constant world.
2. A belief in a created world.
3. A belief in a world designed by a wise and benign Creator.
4. A belief in the unique position of man in the creation. Man has soul something unique
animals don’t have.

Additional to these is the three secular beliefs:

1. A belief in the philosophy of essentialism.
2. A belief in the interpretation of the causal processes of nature as they had been elaborated
by the physicist.
3. A belief in final causes or teleology.

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 V. CONCLUSION

To sum up the discussion, it clearly shows that Darwinism is not a monolithic, immutable
block of scientific theories; on the contrary, it represents a genuine example of an adaptive
framework. During the last third of the nineteenth century, it could be a synonym of evolution for
many people, while today it represents the natural selection mechanism for many others.
Assuming the changing features of Darwinism, we can understand its relationships with
theories about the origin of life in a non-dogmatic line. Obviously, we must not make the mistake
of thinking that every kind of evolutionism is Darwinism. Thus, to distinguish, strategies require
a contextualized analysis. What is considered Darwinism at any given moment should be a good
guideline. Therefore, we could legitimately value the contribution of Darwinism to our
understanding of the origin of life.
As we can see, Darwin’s claim has a scientific basis which leads other individuals to consider
his theory on the origin of life. Whatever the reality is, still Darwin had made a great contribution
both in the field of science and philosophy.

VI. RECOMMENDATION
Studies on how Darwin’s ideas were received and taken up in national contexts provide an
excellent testing ground for serious thought about what Darwinism and Darwinians really is. Even
though we are Christians who believed in One Great Creator, still it is a good avenue for us to start
considering Darwin’s ideas of evolution. This doesn’t mean that we are neglecting what is stated
in the Holy Scripture, but it means broadening our knowledge and opening our minds to other
possibilities. The why’s of Darwin may serve as an enabler for us to think beyond what our minds
have used to believe and absorb.

VII. REFERENCES:

Alexander, R.D. 1979. Darwinism and Human Affairs. Seattle University of Washington Press.
Barzun, J. 1958. Darwin, Marx, and Wagner: Critique of a Heritage. 2nd ed. Garden City, NY: Anchor.
Ghiselin, M.T. 1969. The Triumph of the Darwinian Method. Berkeley: University of California Press
Goldschmidt, R. 1940. The Material Basis of Evolution. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Mayr, E. 2001. What Evolution Is, Basic Books, New York.
Mayr, E. 1991. One Long Argument: Charles Darwin and the Genesis of Modern Evolutionary Thought. Harvard
University Press. Cambridge Massachusetts.
Artigas M, Glick TF, Martínez RA. 2006. Negotiating Darwin: the Vatican confronts evolution, 1877–1902.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Online Sources:
https://robertcurrylab.com/sites/darwins-mockingbirds/how-did-the-mock-birds-especially-influence-darwin/
https://evolution-outreach.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1007/s12052-012-0442-x

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VIII. RESUME
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GINA MARCELINO
CORTEZ
ACADEMIC HISTORY
Doctor of Philosophy in Filipino
University of Batangas (currently enrolled)
Master of Arts in Philippine Studies – Language, Culture, &
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