If you only remember one name in the entire history of modern biology, it should be…

two names.

Because the first biologists were a pair of freaky intellectual twins, just like Newton

and Leibniz.

But with more barnacles and monkeys.

Let’s meet Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace.

[INTRO MUSIC PLAYS]

In the early 1800s, England was already moving

away from the traditional way of thinking about life, which was then called “natural

theology.”

In this belief system, the living world was created by a kindly but hands-off God.

And there were four aspects of Creation: One, there was a divine Creator.

But simply believing in God didn’t prevent you from asking how life works.

Two, there were species that didn’t change, ever.

This idea was known as the fixity of species.

But keep in mind, the French had already worked out that species do change over time and

go extinct.

They just hadn’t figured out how.

The third aspect of natural theology was a short creation, in which the world was only

about six thousand years old.

But geologists had pushed the age of the earth back to millions of years.

And the fourth idea was the one that was still contentious in 1800—a perfect design for

each species.

The idea went: if God made, say, a turtle, he knew what he was doing.

Even if that turtle was stupid or ugly, it was still a designed-by-God original, and

there wasn’t too much sense trying to understand the mechanism, the how, of that design process.

(Note: we here at Crash Course love turtles!

There are no stupid ugly turtles!)

Today, natural theology is associated with philosopher William Paley,

perhaps because he wrote a book in 1802 called... Natural Theology.

This book influenced a young scholar named Charles Darwin.

But wanted to understand the “how.”

Young Chuck originally wanted to become a physician, but he hated the sight of blood.

So he went to Cambridge to study beetles but skipped a lot of lectures.

He earned Gentleman’s Cs and graduated at twenty two with no direction in life, just

a huge collection of beetles.

Which, to be honest, is more than I had.

So Chuck’s family did what any rich family with a beetle-obsessed son would do: they

sent him to South America on a ship with a cute name: The HMS Beagle.