We must, however, acknowledge, as it seems to me, that man with all his noble qualities… still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin. – Charles Darwin Darwin was absolutely fundamental to the understanding of life and the species of the world as we know it today. Charles Robert Darwin was born in 1809, and grew to become a naturalist and geologist who would come to change the world. He was fascinated by the number and variety of fossils from around the world, and the species in their great diversity, and so set out on a five-year voyage on the Beagle to sail around the world to study life in all its forms. While his theories were originally rejected by the science of his day, it came to be seen as incontrovertible fact as more and more data was collected and more species were discovered. DNA research pushed it even further, as we started to see the connections between species in the very genes that composed them. It was impossible not to see that some species originated from other species, and that even man itself had a shared ancestor with the primates. Science would never be the same.
I wonder if he misses his Diplodocus ? A life size statue of Darwin sitting in an armchair overlooks the atrium of the Natural History Museum. The famous ‘dippy’ that dominated the atrium has been moved and is on a tour of the UK. Haven’t been there for a while but I think dippy has been replaced by a blue whale. Stirlingmoz
