Darwin's famous closing sentence describes the " grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one.

In the last chapter of Darwin's Black Box, Behe goes on to explain his view that irreducible complexity is evidence for intelligent design.

While some commentators have taken this as a concession to religion that Darwin later regretted, Darwin's view at the time was of God creating life through the laws of nature, and even in the first edition there are several references to " creation ".

The Social Darwinists ' view is derived from Charles Darwin's interpretation of evolution by natural selection, which is explicitly competitive (" survival of the fittest "), Malthusian (" struggle for existence "), even gladiatorial (" red in tooth and claw "), and permeated by the Victorian laissez-faire ethos of Darwin and his disciples ( such as T. H. Huxley and Herbert Spencer ).

This view of the animal origins of distinctive human characteristics later received support from Charles Darwin's Theory of Evolution.

The species are so distinct that when Charles Darwin collected them in the islands he thought they were completely different birds, and it was only when he was back in London in 1837 that the ornithologist John Gould revealed that they were closely allied, reinforcing Darwin's growing view that “ species are not immutable .” The adaptations of their numerous species, in three genera, show diverging evolution to exploit several ecological niches in the rugged and dry Galápagos Islands.

The neo-Lamarckian version of evolution was more popular than Darwin's in the late 19th century as it made it possible for biological evolution to fit into a framework of a divine or natural directed plan, thus the neo-Lamarckian view of evolution was often advocated by proponents of orthogenesis.

Müller was wary of Darwin's work on human evolution, and attacked his view of the development of human faculties.

His original view, described in the paper " On the Origin of Genera " ( 1868 ), held that while Darwin's natural selection may affect the preservation of superficial characteristics in organisms, natural selection alone could not explain the formation of genera.

In Darwin's view, anything that could be expected to have some adaptive feature could be explained easily with his theory of natural selection.

" He has also stated that " Darwin's theory of macroevolution is plainly wrong, on strictly scientific grounds " and " is, in my view, a rather obvious fraud, which cannot withstand the mildest scrutiny " and that " benefits of embryonic stem cell research have been vastly oversold ".

Gray denied that investigation of physical causes stood opposed to the theological view and the study of the harmonies between mind and Nature, and thought it " most presumable that an intellectual conception realized in Nature would be realized through natural agencies ".. Thomas Huxley, who strongly promoted Darwin's ideas while campaigning to end the dominance of science by the clergy, coined the term agnostic to describe his position that God's existence is unknowable, and Darwin also took this position, but evolution was also taken up by prominent atheists including Edward Aveling and Ludwig Büchner and it was criticised, in the words of one reviewer, as " tantamount to atheism ".

The term Darwinism had covered a wide range of ideas, many of which differed from Darwin's views, but it became associated with the minority view of August Weismann who went further than Darwin by rejecting inheritance of acquired characters and attributing all evolution to natural selection, a view also called neo-Darwinism.

Though contrary to Darwin's view, Weismann's belief that determinants shape the body, and never vice versa, has long been known as the central dogma of modern biology.

Though Behe has avoided committing himself to the view that God intervenes directly in nature to create purportedly irreducibly complex structures, Darwin's Black Box briefly speculates that divine intervention might have caused the direct creation of a cell from which all of life evolved, supporting creationist views of miraculous acts of creation, but ironically echoing Darwin's stated " view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one ".

In this text, as in his others, Zahm argued that Roman Catholicism could fully accept an evolutionary view of biological systems, as long as this view was not centered around Darwin's theory of natural selection.

Darwin's notebooks developed an essentially materialist and deterministic view of human beings, with the conclusions that freewill was an illusion and the brain was mechanistic.

His view was that competition was between groups, leading " to the inevitable extinction of all those low and mentally undeveloped populations with which the Europeans come into contact ", Darwin's experience supported this and he wrote on his copy " natural selection is now acting on the inferior races when put into competition ", giving the example of Māoris in New Zealand " dying out like their own native rat ".

( This is an interesting opinion in view of Bowlby's diagnostic conjecture that most of the symptoms of Darwin's long term illness arose from an anxiety-related hyperventilation syndrome originating in his bereavement following the death of his mother in 1817 ).

In early 1875 Darwin's European population had grown to approximately 300 because of the gold rush.

However, many of Darwin's early supporters ( such as Alfred Russel Wallace and Charles Lyell ) did not agree that the origin of the mental capacities and the moral sensibilities of humans could be explained by natural selection.

Studies of Charles Darwin's notebooks have shown that Darwin arrived separately at the idea of natural selection which he set out in his 1859 book On the Origin of Species, but it has been speculated that he may have had some half-forgotten memory from his time as a student in Edinburgh of ideas of selection in nature as set out by Hutton, and by William Charles Wells and Patrick Matthew who had both been associated with the city before publishing their ideas on the topic early in the 19th century.

The importance of isolation in forming species had played a significant part in Darwin's early thinking, as shown in his Essay of 1844.

In the early 20th century, many anthropologists accepted and taught the belief that biologically distinct races were isomorphic with distinct linguistic, cultural, and social groups, while popularly applying that belief to the field of eugenics, in conjunction with a practice that is now called scientific racism. Charles Darwin's theory of evolution was co-opted by the budding eugenics movement to justify systematic population and racial planning in the early 20th century.

The largest part of his life was devoted to the study of history, but at an early age inquiries into the nature of human progress led him to a careful study of the doctrine of evolution, and it was through the popularization of Charles Darwin's work that he first became known to the public.

Charles Darwin's early interest in nature led him on a five-year voyage on which established him as an eminent geologist whose observations and theories supported Charles Lyell's uniformitarian ideas, and publication of his journal of the voyage made him famous as a popular author.

During the early twentieth century, the public was especially interested in animal intelligence due in a large part to Charles Darwin's then-recent publications.

The discovery of the Neanderthal in Germany, Thomas Huxley's Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature, and Charles Darwin's The Descent of Man were all important to early paleoanthropological research.

The baby's illness and early death kept Darwin from attending the first publication of Darwin's theory at the joint reading of papers by Alfred Russel Wallace and himself titled On the Tendency of Species to form Varieties ; and on the Perpetuation of Varieties and Species by Natural Means of Selection at the meeting of the Linnean Society on 1 July 1858.

Among early works exploring the idea of a transmutation of species was Erasmus Darwin's 1796 Zoönomia and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck's Philosophie Zoologique of 1809.

In 1858 the information that Alfred Russel Wallace now had a similar theory forced early joint publication of Darwin's theory.

Leidy was an early American supporter of Darwin's theory of evolution, and lobbied successfully for Darwin's election to membership in the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia.

His Ph. D. was on The reproductive behaviour and the nature of sexual selection in Scatophaga stercoraria L. ( yellow dung fly ), and provided a detailed quantitative test of Darwin's theory of sexual selection, and an early application of optimality theory in biology.

Here Nietzsche criticizes Darwin, as he frequently does, as naive and derivative of Hobbes and early English economists and without an account of life from the " inside " ( and consider in this light Darwin's own introduction to the first edition of Origin ) ( consider also Nietzsche's critique to the effect that Darwinism, as typically understood, is trading in a new version of the Providential ):

Padel's poems connected Darwin's loss of his mother as a child with his passion for collecting ; and linked his early scientific writing with his taxidermy teacher in Edinburgh John Edmonstone, a freed slave from Guiana.

Only the economically important species have had their reproduction studied in any detail: the larvae and juveniles of Darwin's slimehead are pelagic and frequent rather shallow waters near the coast, whereas in orange roughy the early life stages are apparently confined to deeper water ( ca.

Darwin's correspondent Wallace arrived independently at his own version of the theory, which brought an early announcement of the theory and the publication of On the Origin of Species through Natural Selection in 1859.

After publication of the Origin of Species, Darwin's children convinced him to save a far greater proportion of his correspondence, so that the sequence from the early 1860s onwards is remarkably full.

A full discussion of the significance of Darwin's early notebooks-together with an annotated presentation of their text-can be found in Paul H. Barrett's Metaphysics, Materialism and the Evolution of Mind-Early Writings of Charles Darwin ( 1980 ).

It is noteworthy that Freud's early publications on the symptoms of hysteria-with their influential concept of emotional conflict-acknowledged debts to Darwin's work on emotional expression, that Freud's later The Interpretation of Dreams ( 1900 )-a work which lingered on the immediate presentation of mental processes-contained no illustrations, and that Darwin published nothing on dreams as a mode of emotional expression.

At a conference hosted by the University of Maryland, Baltimore, School of Medicine on the topic of Darwin's ailments, gastroenterologist Dr. Sidney Cohen of Thomas Jefferson University concluded that in his early years Darwin had suffered Cyclic Vomiting Syndrome, but as he had brought up secretions such as stomach acid rather than food, this had not affected his weight and nutrition.