Charles Darwin was a naturalist who loved bird watching. This is one of the reasons that he often studied pigeons during his research. Most of his observations as a naturalist took place while traveling on ships as the ship's naturalist. Traveling as part of a ships crew was a very common way for scientists to get out and see the rest of the world. Darwin's most renowned voyage was from 1831-1836, at the age of 22, on the HMS Beagle.
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| Map of the Beagle voyage |
While on this voyage Darwin started to ponder many of the thoughts that would later be worked into the theory of evolution. I am not going to go into great detail on Darwin's notes, he was a copious note taker, however, you can read them Here.
For Darwin, seeing the world and all its inhabitants was life changing. His big revelation was that biology and evolution can explain how modern organisms evolved over long periods of time from a common ancestor. What we call the Theory of Evolution is all the varied pieces of explanation that Darwin deduced as he tried to figure out how the organisms had changed over time.
Darwin's Theory of Evolution is not one theory but a series of theories and laws that support and give proof for the concept that we call evolution. The theory of evolution includes concepts that we are familiar with, or if you are not we will be addressing in upcoming posts, such as Natural Selection, Mutations, Speciation, and many others. We will get into each of these in the next few posts.
More of Darwin's works:
His Manuscripts
His publications
Creation. This movie is a very good piece of historical fiction about Darwin's work on the Theory of Evolution
The Movie Creation is currently up on Vimeo to watch in full
Stuff on PBS about Darwin
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