What Charles Darwin Never Knew – Owen Stuart
Charles Darwin was an English naturalist, geologist, and biologist, best known for his contributions to the science of evolution with his publication of his book “On the Origin of Species.” Charles Darwin’s discoveries that were made are the reason he was given the name “the Father of Evolution” and the reason that we now know how everything we came to be. During the time that Charles Darwin had made this discovery, it was not known to be true based on the lack of technology, his theory was only proven to be true up until DNA was discovered and looked upon. Charles Darwin’s thirst for discovery had led him sailing the season the ship known as the HMS Beagle, on this excursion Darwin had been observing the same species of bird known as the finch on different islands. He had noticed that on each different island the same species of bird possessed different shaped beaks in order to adapt to the different environment. Along with the finches, adaptation was the tortoises with different patterned shells and colors dependent on which islands they lived on. With this discovery, Darwin had created a new theory known as natural selection, which was the process whereby organisms better adapted to their environment tend to survive and produce more offspring.
The study of DNA had opened many doors into the process of evolution that we could have ever known. With DNA came the ability to look back in time and see the ancestors of living organisms today, this played an important role as it showed how organisms were much like others until they had to adapt to a new environment. This can be seen in humans as the ear bones were developed from fish gills, this shows how small changes in DNA bases can create large changes in different species. In today’s date, scientists know of parts of DNA called switches can that turn on and off specific genes. Back in the time of Charles Darwin, his theory of natural selection could never have been proved to be true until today, with the evidence of DNA studying shows how Darwin theory was correct after all.
With the study of DNA came the ability to see how organisms had adapted to survive, and how they got to where they are in the present day. In the future DNA can be used to help shape organisms and keep or discard specific genes. Sure it seems as we had done most of the work surrounding evolution, but without Charles Darwin, we probably would have never known so much about how we evolve and how we came to be.