Darwin, I Choose You!

Darwin’s theory makes many good arguments for his process of natural selection. However, his most powerful observation comes early in his work. On page 82, Darwin mentions the ‘Vestiges of Creation,’ claiming that these documents would have people believe that a woodpecker was created by a bird giving birth to a random pattern of genes that gave it those qualities. Darwin starts his argument here saying that it makes no sense to assume that a fully developed new species would come forth in one generation from another species. Instead, Darwin proposes that organic beings must interact with each other and their physical surroundings in order to develop into new species. This is the most important part of his argument because it provides the basis for the rest of his future argument. In chapter 3, he speaks of the struggle for existence and how this could effect a species. The arguments proposed here fall back to the idea that a new species forms because the natural environment that it exists in slowly molds beings over generations, not because a mutant being of a new species is born from an existing species. While Darwin develops his argument using examples in later parts of the text, he reinforces the basis of his most important argument right away. He admits that in nature, strange things could happen. To strengthen his argument, he starts with cultivated plants and animals that have been bred. This way, any variations in the animals are specifically selected for according to his theory. Because Darwin refers back to the same basic argument throughout his piece, I believe that his most important argument is that new species must be molded by their entire environment and they cannot just appear in their full form from a pre-existing species.