Charles Darwin

1
Charles Darwin

• Background Information
• Lived from 1809-1882
• Dabbled in medicine but rejected it due to the
  brutality of the surgeries
• Dad was a wealthy doctor and financer
• Attended Anglican Shrewsbury School
• Born in Shrewsbury, Shropshire, England

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Contributions

• Gave Darwinism
• Origin of biological diversity via evolution
  (predates Darwin)
• Natural selection
• Wrote origin of species (publicized 1859)
• Synthesized the then current understanding of
  geology. The diversity if life, the domestication
  of plants and animals with the contention of
  Malthus that populations are limited in size by
  external factors
• Natural selection- idea that when organisms with
  in environment limited populations die, or dont
  reproduce as much as they could, this is not
  random
• Natural selection is differential success in
  reproduction (unequal ability of individuals to
  survive and reproduce)
• Natural selection occurs through an interaction
  between the environment and the variability
  inherent among the individual organisms making up
  population
• The product of natural selection is the adoption
  of populations of organisms to their environment.

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Experiments

• 13 species of finches in the Galapagos Islands.
  Only in South America
• Observed that the species differed from each
  other in beak size and different foods
• Also observed that the beak varies were
  associated with diets based on different foods
• Concluded that when South American finches
  reached the islands and dispersed to different
  environments, they had adapted over many
  generations to the conditions.

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Influences

• Linnaeus
• Lyell
• Lamarck
• Malthus
• Wallace