Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
needed was the money to pay the tuition fees! You also had to be male - girls were
not allowed to attend university at this time.
To his father's dismay, but fortunately for us, this plan failed. Charles was
appalled by the sufferings of patients undergoing surgery - anaesthetics were not
used in medicine until the end of the 1840s. So he left the medical school in
Edinburgh, and went to Cambridge in 1828 to study for becoming an Anglican par-
son, which was a common fate for wealthy young gentlemen in his day. While at
Cambridge he became friendly with two professors - Adam Sedgwick, the profes-
sor of geology, and John Henslow, the professor of botany. He did well in his final
examinations in 1831, but then went on a summer field trip with Sedgwick to North
Wales, to learn geology first hand from an expert. He planned to use this geolog-
ical expertise for a trip he was thinking of making to the Canary Islands in order
to study the natural history of tropical regions, before becoming a country parson.
But on returning from this field trip, Darwin found a letter from Henslow propos-
ing him as a suitable gentleman naturalist and companion to Captain Robert Fitzroy
on the HMS
Beagle
, an Admiralty ship that was about to leave on an expedition to
chart the coastline of South America. This was perhaps the most important letter in
the history of science, because it resulted in Darwin abandoning his father's hope
that he become a country parson, and instead to become one of the most influential
people in the history of human thought.
HMS
Beagle
left Plymouth in December 1831 for what was planned to be a two-
year voyage, but returned nearly five years later in 1836, after sailing around the
world. The ship visited not only both the East and West coasts of South America,
but also the Galapagos Islands, Tahiti, New Zealand, Australia, Mauritus, Capetown
and various other islands. Darwin made many trips inland, observing and collecting
plant and animal specimens new to science that he sent back to Henslow in England,
as well as recording the geology of these regions. Tropical rain forests especially
delighted him, as they were rich in plants and insects previously unknown, as they
still are today. He witnessed earthquakes, found fossils of large extinct mammals
that looked curiously like some much smaller mammals around today, such as
armadillos, and discovered the shells of marine organisms at the top of mountains.
While at Cambridge, Darwin was required to read topics by the Anglican philoso-
pher William Paley. One such topic was entitled
Natural Theology
, first published
in 1802. In this topic, Paley argued that observations of the living world strongly
indicated that it had been deliberately created by an intelligent supernatural being.
His basic argument stems from the obvious fact that living organisms are much
more complicated than non-living objects like rocks, and moreover their complexity
enables them to survive and reproduce their kind in the particular environments in
which they live. Today we express this by saying that organisms are highly adapted
to their environments. Paley then used a metaphor to explain his reasoning - the
metaphor of a watchmaker - and his argument is referred to as the Argument from
Design.
Paley pointed out that if we encounter a rock during a country walk, its nature
raises no particularly puzzling questions. But if we found a watch, and had not
seen one before, we would observe that, compared to the rock, the watch is much
