1859 - "On The Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection"

Charles Darwin (1809-1882) was born into the gentry class in Victorian England (his family was wealthy and well connected) in 1809. He was educated at Edinburgh and Cambridge and as a young man, Charles considered medicine and the clergy as professions - he even nearly became an Anglican Priest, but his real passion was naturalism. He began his university career at Edinburgh as a student of Medicine, but he dropped out of this pursuit and finished his degree in Theology at Cambridge. Throughout this time, his real interest continued to be the study of nature, but he hadn't seen that this interest could lead to a real profession for a "gentleman."

In 1831, the H.M.S. Beagle was scheduled to set sail on a five year venture Captained by Robert Fitzroy. Professor J.S. Henslow had recommended to the captain that Darwin accompany him as a "gentleman companion and scientific observer." Early on Darwin had practiced a very liberal, Biblical interpretation, which caused great debate between he and Captain FitzRoy - an Evangelical Christian.

Upon reaching the Galopogas Islands of South America - an event that would change Darwin's life and began the global indoctrination of a new anti-God religion - evolution, Darwin noticed great variation amongst the finches. As a result, he began to send field notes of his observances/interpretations back for publication. These published notes, upon his return from the voyage in 1836, had earned him much acclaim as a respected naturalist.

He moved out of London to a country estate to spend the rest of his life in a relatively happy and affluent family life and to engage in scientific study and writing. In 1859 he published "On the Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection," which made him world famous in more ways than one. Prior to Darwin publishing his book, Biblical Christianity tended to play a very important role as to the origin of life on earth.

By age 50, Darwin had begun to practice a theistic-evolutionary theology and made such a liberal reference in his book:

"I see no good reason why the views given in this volume should shock the religious feelings of any one. It is satisfactory, as showing how transient such impressions are, to remember that the greatest discovery ever made by man, namely, the law of the attraction of gravity, was also attacked by Leibnitz, "as subversive of natural, and inferentially of revealed, religion." A celebrated author and divine has written to me that he has gradually learnt to see that it is just as noble a conception of the Deity to believe that He created a few original forms capable of self-development into other and needful forms, as to believe that He required a fresh act of creation to supply the voids caused by the action of His laws... It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the conditions of life and from use and disuse: a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved."

Over the remaining 20 years of his life, Darwin fell even farther becoming an agnostic and gave up religion completely.

Darwin had formulated his basic views on evolution through natural selection by 1842, but he was very shy about publishing, clearly nervous about the reception. In 1858 he received a letter from a younger naturalist, Alfred Wallace, in which ideas very similar to his own were presented. Darwin knew he had better make his ideas public or Wallace would take full credit. The two men agreed they would take joint credit for the theory of evolution through natural selection and their two papers were presented to the Linnaean Society in London in on July 1, 1858 (Wallace called the theory "Darwinism" out of respect for the older scholar.).

Darwin's observances for variation laid the foundation for the modern hypotheses of macro-evolution, which claims the dinosaur-to-bird fairy tale. The reality of Darwin's observances clearly represented a great deal of adaptation and variation within a bird-kind. Those finches today still represent the same features Darwin saw and, in accordance with Biblical creationism, they still today remain as finches.