Great Thinkers: Charles Darwin and Evolution
15 November 2011
A marine iguana sunbathes on rocks of San Cristobal Island in the Galapagos Archipelago. The strange animals of the Galapagos made Darwin wonder about how species develop and change.
STEVE EMBER: Welcome to Explorations, in VOA Special English. I'm Steve Ember. This week, Barbara Klein and I tell about one of the most influential thinkers in science history.
Charles Darwin developed the theory of how living things develop from simpler organisms over long periods of time. That theory is known as evolution through natural selection.
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How do new kinds of life come into existence? For much of recorded history, people have believed that organisms were created. Few people believed that living things changed. What process could make such change possible?
These were some of the questions Charles Darwin asked himself over years of research in botany, zoology and geology. He was not the first person to ask them. His own grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, believed that species evolved. And others, like the French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamark, had proposed ways this could happen. But it was Darwin who identified and explained the process, natural selection, that causes life to evolve.
BARBARA KLEIN: Charles Darwin was born in Shrewsbury, England on February twelfth, eighteen-oh-nine. His father Robert Darwin was a doctor. Charles' mother Susannah Darwin was the daughter of the famous potter, Josiah Wedgwood. She died when Charles was only eight years old.
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