Q: Does Darwin the real father of theory of Evolution? If he is not the original creator of the idea, why he has such a great accomplishment in the natural science history? Why he has been recognised as the “Father of the Evolution Theory” over the other writers who wrote about evolution before or at the same time with him?

A: Darwin’s name is inextricably bound with the idea of evolution, and rightly so, for he came up with a mechanism that could explain how it happened: natural selection.

In fairness, however, he was not the only person to do so. Alfred Russell Wallace, a surveyor and collector and an acquaintance of Darwin’s, independently came up with the same theory during a bout of malarial fever in Indonesia. It was his letter to Darwin, written in 1858, in which he detailed his theory that finally got Darwin to break his 20-year silence, and publish the work that would come to be called On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. This is not to say that Darwin trampled over Wallace – far from it. Their ideas were initially presented together at a meeting of the Linnean Society in 1858. However, what Darwin did that cemented his reputation as the father of natural selection was assemble a vast amount of evidence in support of his theory, from such diverse fields as geology, embryology, ecology, and animal breeding. The theory needed it, for it challenged deeply held beliefs about the separation of mankind from the animal kingdom that would be hard to overturn. It is a credit to Darwin’s efforts that he lived to see his work become the basis of the modern science of biology.

While Darwin is viewed as the father of natural selection he was certainly not the father of evolution. The idea that life forms change over time has a far older pedigree. The Greek philosopher Anaximander speculated on the origin of mankind from fish (albeit in one revolutionary step) in the sixth century BC. However, the first person to address evolution in anything like a scientific way was the French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, who published his ideas at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The core of his theory was the notion that characteristics acquired during an organism’s lifetime could be inherited by its offspring. For example, an antelope that spent its life stretching up its head to reach leaves on the low branches of trees would, according to Lamarck, give birth to offspring with slightly longer necks. Over generations, this process would result in a giraffe.

Lamarck’s theory lacked the inherent logic and explanatory power of natural selection. It also lacked one of the key assertions of Darwin’s theory – that living things diverge over time. Instead, Lamarck proposed that simple life forms were continually springing into being from non-living matter, each then following its own linear evolutionary pathway towards greater and greater complexity. There was no evidence at the time that this continuous generation of life was going on, and now we know that this is probably impossible – the physical and chemical conditions under which life originated no longer exist on Earth, and haven’t for billions of years. As a final nail in the coffin, in the 1880s it was shown that acquired characteristics are not inherited, but by this time Darwin’s alternative was well on the way to widespread acceptance.

Though Lamarck’s theory is now regarded as incorrect, his contribution to science was nevertheless very important. Thanks to him and others like him, evolution was being talked about by the time Darwin came along. Indeed, Darwin’s own grandfather Erasmus was a keen supporter, as was Robert Grant, an invertebrate zoologist that Darwin worked with when he was a student at Edinburgh University. These people all helped to sow the seed of evolution in Darwin’s mind, so that when he sailed around the world on the Beagle, the significance of what he saw, particularly in the inhabitants of the Galapagos Islands, did not completely pass him by.

Finally, it is important to note that Darwin’s was not a complete theory of evolution, for it did not explain the mechanism of inheritance or the source of the variations upon which natural selection works. Only with the rediscovery of the Austrian scientist Gregor Mendel’s work on heritability and the discovery of the structure and function of DNA in the 1950s did the pieces finally fall into place. Nevertheless, it was thanks to Darwin that evolution became established as the scientific explanation of the origin of species, and it is right that we celebrate this mild-mannered Englishman as the father of one of the greatest revolutions in the history of science.