What Made Charles Darwin Propose His Theory Of Evolution?

Charles Darwin (1809-1882) while on voyage aboard "The HMS Beagle" (ship) made observation about the great variety of birds and reptiles on the Galapagos Islands and their relationship on the Ecuadorian mainland. Charles Darwin was also inspired by the work of his ecologist friend Charles Lyell whose major thesis was that geological forces produce a constant changing environment.

He also came across an essay on population written by a clergyman and economist Thomas Malthus, who maintained that the human population tends to increase at a much greater rate than does the food supply necessary to sustain the population. Darwin studied essay outlining a similar theory of evolution by another naturalist Alferd Russel Wallace who observed diversity in plants and animals and their peculiar distribution in South America, Malaya, and Indian Archip elago. He was also aware of the practices of plant and animal breeders in producing, in a few generation, the desired traits in domestic animals and plants by selective breeding.

All this knowledge helped Charless Darwin to propose the theory of evolution by natural selection. He presented his theory at a scientific meeting of Linnean Society in London (1858) and published his famous book named "the origin of species by means of natural selection" in 1859. The salient features of Darwin's theory of evolution are overproduction, heritable variations, Competition for survival, and natural selection.

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The comparison of the findings on Galapagos Island and why life there had not evolved any further as it had in the other continents of the planet.

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