Charles Darwin - One Of The Fathers Of The Evolutionary Theory
The tree of life’s wisdom is a living and rapidly expanding organism. Every soul, through the learning it gathers from its own experiences, is constantly adding to the knowledge that is already there. Thus the tree constantly grows and expands. Like on any tree, branches that are no longer productive and refuse to grow, have to die and will eventually be chopped off by those in charge of the tree.
Charles Robert Darwin was born in Shrewsbury, England, 12 February 1809 – 19 April 1882, the English naturalist, geologist and biologist, who was best known for his contributions to the science of evolution that established that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestors. Darwin’s Sun was in Aquarius and his Moon in Capricorn. The latter can be an indication of an overly cautious, timid and easily frightened personality that clings to tradition and the past, and is highly duty conscious. His Sun was trying to pull him forwards into as yet unknown fields of discovery, but his Moon for a long time firmly tied him to the past. Small wonder he struggled so much with the beliefs of his religion.
Born on the 12th day of February, he was also strongly under the influence of Sagittarius. This is the sign dedicated to the development of the following things: higher and Highest education, the laws – those of the Earth as well as the Universal ones, humankind’s superconscious faculties. Travelling and exploring on the earthly plane of life as much as the spiritual realms are also part of the Sagittarian domain. That’s why people born into this signs are known as the gypsies of the zodiac, but alas also as its procrastinators. Sagittarius and Aquarius are both forward looking signs. Some of the latter ones are known to be capable of thinking fifty years ahead of their time. His Sun in Aquarius and Moon in Capricorn are an indication that Darwin’s nature had two diametrically opposed parts and they caused him a great deal of conflict.
Darwin’s middle name Robert reveals the presence of Scorpionic energies in his character make-up. This awakens in many human souls the urge to explore the hidden aspects of life and peering behind the scenery of what can be observed by more superficial viewers. But, to those who are willing to dig beneath the surface and look beyond the ends of their noses, life willingly begins to reveal even its deepest mysteries and that on all its levels. This is what happened to Darwin and the result was his theory of evolution, which explained for the first time in the history of humankind that all living things on the Earth are connected with each other.
During his explorations on the Galapagos Islands Darwin in particular found much convincing evidence that any species that does not change dies and soon becomes extinct. The progress of our world is obstructed by anything that does not obey the law of evolution and refuses to make the required modifications, so that it has to be removed. This applies to everything that takes part in God’s Creation and therefore also the religions of our world that from time to time came and eventually disappeared. None of them ever came into being from nowhere. Each new belief system evolved and grew from all previous ones. On every occasion the Angels presented our world with a fresh legend, which during that period was right for the requirements of our race’s spiritual development, as well as for the region in which it was presented.
Nothing in the whole of Creation ever stands still and even the Angels are on an evolutionary pathway of their own. As we move forwards and upwards on the spiral of life, so do they. This is how it came about that, when the time for Judaism’s appearance had come, they gave us the legend of Abraham or originally Abram, who would eventually be considered to be the common patriarch of the three Abrahamic religions. In Judaism he was presented as the founding father of the Covenant of the special relationship between the Jewish people and God. In Christianity, he became the prototype of all believers, Jewish or Gentile. To denigrate Jewish claims of an exclusive relationship with God, Islam knows him as a ‘believer before the fact’. It would be a long time before any of them knew who or what God really is * and that in truth the whole of humankind is God’s chosen people *.
Be that as it may, the Great Father/Mother of all life was working through Darwin, the same as S/He does through each one of us. The Angels, as the executors of the God’s great plan of life, were the only authority who, before Darwin made his discoveries and gave them to our world, knew that unmodified ideas, the same as creatures and plants, are doomed. It has taken an astonishingly long time before our world could even begin to understand the presence of the Universal laws, God’s laws, and that all life in the whole of Creation is subject to them. With the help of Darwin’s observations the idea of the all-important law of evolution could at last be seeded into our world’s individual and collective consciousness.
Darwin’s findings were intended to act as a general waking up call for humankind, but being a devout Christian, he spent many sleepless nights struggling with the obvious results of his researches. Because of his own spiritual view of the world and that of the establishment around him, which was still dominated by the church and its beliefs, Darwin hesitated to publish his findings. They had shaken his own belief in the Creation story to its foundations and he knew only too well that they would cause an almighty uproar in the world around him. Unable to make up his mind to go ahead, he struggled with his conscience and procrastinated endlessly.
The Angels had expected that Darwin would encounter these difficulties. In their wisdom they decided to give the idea to another scientist as well. But eventually no further delays in the publication of his evolutionary theory could be tolerated by those in charge of our world on the higher and highest levels of life. That’s why in 1858, while Darwin was still writing his notes for what was going to be called ‘The Origin of the Species’, another intrepid traveller and explorer, like Darwin, surprisingly appeared on the scene. His name was Alfred Russell Wallace. Born 8.1.1823 his Sun was in Capricorn and his Moon in Sagittarius. Wallace contacted Darwin with the astounding news that his studies and observations had led him to the same conclusions as Darwin’s about the origin of all species in our world.
There really was no point in further delaying the publishing of Darwin’s findings. The result was an almost immediate joint presentation of the theory both men had developed. This is how Alfred Russel Wallace, 8 January 1823 – 7 November 1913 entered into the picture. He was a British naturalist, explorer, geographer, anthropologist and biologist, who was best known for independently conceiving the theory of evolution through natural selection. His paper on the subject was jointly published with some of Charles Darwin’s writings in 1858. That prompted Darwin to go ahead with making his own ideas about evolution public in ‘On the Origin of Species’. This book introduced the scientific theory that the branching patterns of evolution resulted from a process that he called natural selection, in which the struggle for existence has a similar effect to the artificial selection involved in selective breeding.
Wallace too had done extensive fieldwork, first in the Amazon River basin and then in the Malay Archipelago, where he identified the faunal divide now termed the Wallace Line, which separates the Indonesian archipelago into two distinct parts: a western portion in which the animals are largely of Asian origin, and an eastern portion where the fauna reflect Australasia. Wallace was considered the 19th century’s leading expert on the geographical distribution of animal species and is sometimes called the father of biogeography.
Wallace was one of the leading evolutionary thinkers of the 19th century and made many other contributions to the development of the evolutionary theory besides being the co-discoverer of natural selection. These included the concept of warning colouration in animals and the Wallace effect, a hypothesis on how natural selection could contribute to speciation by encouraging the development of barriers against hybridisation.
Wallace was strongly attracted to unconventional ideas, such as evolution. His advocacy of spiritualism and his belief in a non-material origin for the higher mental faculties of humans strained his relationship with some members of the scientific establishment. On top of his scientific work, he was a social activist and critical of capitalism, which he considered to be an unjust social and economic system in 19th-century Britain. Wallace’s interest in natural history resulted in his being one of the first prominent scientists to raise concerns over the environmental impact of human activities. He was also a prolific author who wrote on both scientific and social issues. The account of his adventures and observations during his explorations in Singapore, Indonesia and Malaysia, The Malay Archipelago, was both popular and highly regarded. Since its publication in 1869 it has never been out of print.
In a letter to his brother-in-law in 1861, Wallace wrote: ‘I remain an utter disbeliever in almost all that you consider the most sacred truths. I will pass over as utterly contemptible the oft-repeated accusation that sceptics shut out evidence because they will not be governed by the morality of Christianity. . . I am thankful I can see much to admire in all religions. To the mass of humankind religion of some kind is a necessity. But whether there be a God and whatever be His nature, whether we have an immortal soul or not, or whatever may be our state after death, I have no fear that I shall have to suffer for the study of nature and the search for truth. I wonder whether those who have lived in the belief of doctrines inculcated from childhood and which to them are rather a matter of blind faith than intelligent conviction, will be better off in a future state.’
* Recommended Reading:
• ‘On The Wings Of God’s Truth’
• ‘God’s Chosen People’
This article is a chapter from ‘Our World In Crisis’
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