by Richard William Nelson | May 30, 2010
In a letter to Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker, his closest friend in 1857, Charles Darwin confided, “I cannot swallow Man [being that] distinct from a Chimpanzee.” Chimp genetics, by extension of Darwin’s theory, were expected to be similar to humans. Charles Darwin writes in his Autobiography –
“My Descent of Man was published in February 1871. As soon as I had become, in the year 1837 or 1838, convinced that species were mutable products, I could not avoid the belief that man must come under the same law.”
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by Richard William Nelson | May 9, 2010
In 1856, just three years before the publication of The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, the first Neanderthal in the fossil record was discovered in the Neander Valley limestone quarry located in Germany.
In The Descent of Man, Darwin argued against the concept that the Neanderthals were humans’ ancestors based on the Neanderthal skull’s larger size. “Nevertheless,” Darwin noted,
“It must be admitted that some skulls of very high antiquity, such as the famous one of Neanderthal, are well developed and capacious.”
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by Richard William Nelson | Apr 18, 2010
Darwin had a significant influence on Karl Marx (pictured left). Struggle and survival are central to Darwin’s theory of evolution. The full 1859 title of The Origin is – On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection and the Survival of the Fittest in the Preservation of Favoured Races.
Darwin’s premise about survival and struggle in nature paralleled Karl Marx’s premise about class struggle. Marx summarized the importance of “struggle” in the first line of chapter one of The Communist Manifesto, published in 1848 –
“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”
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by Richard William Nelson | Apr 4, 2010
In 1825, at the age of sixteen, Charles Darwin was sent to Edinburgh University to study medicine. Soon, however, he found the study of medicine “intolerably dull” and “hated the sight of blood.” Fearing that his eighteen-year-old son would “ne’er do well,” his father transferred him to Christ’s College (pictured left), University of Cambridge.
His father, Robert Darwin, thought that a generalist Bachelor of Arts degree would qualify him to be a government clergyman. The Church of England offered a low-cost, high-status career pathway, a position socially comparable to medicine, law, or politics.
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by Richard William Nelson | Jan 3, 2010
Molecular clocks played a significant role in the search for evidence of biological evolution over the past seventy-five years. Driven by biotechnological advances, the integration of molecules with morphology reflects the shift from Darwinism to the Modern Synthesis theory of evolution.
Early formulations of the molecular-clock concept assumed that biological molecules—DNA, RNA, and proteins—accumulated sequence changes at consistant rates. These changes were envisioned to as chronological signatures within a lineage, similar to growth rings in a tree trunk. By tracing the order and magnitude of these changes, researchers expected to reconstruct the evolutionary history of each species.
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In a letter to Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker, his closest friend in 1857, Charles Darwin confided, “I cannot swallow Man [being that] distinct from a Chimpanzee.” Chimp genetics, by extension of Darwin’s theory, were expected to be similar to humans. Charles Darwin writes in his Autobiography –
In 1856, just three years before the publication of 
Darwin had a significant influence on 
