Explain who Darwin was and why he was important in advancing evolutionary theory?

Answer 1

Charles Robert Darwin was a beetle-delighted Englishmen rushing off to be enveloped by the churchworld of clergymen. He studied divinity as a student but was also enthralled by Natural History and geology. He shot off on a voyage around the world, seeing evidence for (well, he didn't quite know I don't think). Before him, it was known that life was variable, but nobody knew what that meant. Darwin (on return to England) discovered Natural Selection, an explanation for how life changed. Life was not fixed. Darwin knew of breeding dogs and pigeons and knew of the variety hidden in life. That variety, he thought, could be propagated in wild populations too. He thought that life changed as a branching tree of life, driven (perhaps partly, perhaps wholly) by Natural Selection. All life arose by common ancestry. And humans were not apart from 'all life'. They arose from the apes and moreover they arose from African apes (gorillas and chimpanzees would be found to be closer related to humans than the Indonesian orangutan). That final sentence was one of Darwin's predictions (prophecies if you like) and it turned out to be true. Darwin was extremely hardworking (he wrote...well I won't say hundreds....many a letter a day) and very meticulous/accurate in observation. I think these are very good qualities in a scientist. Darwin seems to have gathered a hypothesis in his hands and constructed it (not brick by brick) feather by feather, leaf by leaf, stamen by stamen, stinger by stinger, scale by scale into a major theory. How many people working today can we name, make a mere, feeble hypothesis into a such a whopping theory? Newton did it with his calculus and his law of gravity (in his theory of the planetary movements). Einstein did it with Relativity. Most scientists work with miniscule little subcorners of this and that, never doing anything particularly grand. That is why Darwin is important. He did so much. He wrote a whole book, 'one long argument', On the Origin of Species, and I have a feeling that is only the tip of the iceberg of what he intended to scribble down, but he didn't have the time.