Darwin Revelation

I live in a world of numerous and differing cultures. I am fortunate enough to live in a place where each culture is just one piece of this giant puzzle that we make to be life and we use these pieces to make a thriving and living society, whether by large groups or otherwise. Just one person can make the tiniest bit of difference in the world. Cultures can grow and thrive from the influence of just a single person.
During high school, and now more so in my college classes and my own experience at looking at the world, I’ve learned that throughout history, cultures and entire nations have been under the influence of powerful people who can radically change the path of life in a heartbeat or over the course of years. Sometimes unexpected and terrible things result as outcomes, but most of the time the changes are positive ones made by inspirational and revolutionary thinkers. When you look at the past, you analyze how a culture or civilization once lived and you see how differently we live now. We are able to live in a time where, in a generalization, we are free to make our own decisions and determine how best to live our lives on our own terms. We have the freedom to express ourselves, to wonder and discover religion, and to escape persecution, from our own opinions, and those of the ones around us.
One such figure that has changed the way in which the human race looks at the world is Charles Darwin. During the time Darwin was alive, society was just beginning to look at the world through the separation of religion and science. The world has always believed the existence of man kind was due to the god Christ and what he reigned determined man’s path through life and when they died whether they would be saved in heaven or sentenced to eternal damnation. We believed that our beginnings on this earth were due to the Bible story of the Seven Day Creation and our path in life was determined and guided by God’s will. Darwin, being a man who followed science more so than religion, came to question this rule that had long been established as the only knowledge of the puzzle of what it’s like to be human. He broke away from the social norms and begin to explore and hypothesis and make his own conclusions. He came up with his theory of evolution, which challenged a worldwide acceptance of our existence. “A long path leads from the origins of primitive “life,” which existed at least 3.5 billion years ago, to the profusion and diversity of life that exists today. This path is best understood as a product of evolution.” (Appleman 290) He was telling us that we were not created by a higher deity but we evolved over the course of millions of years. We started as the most primitive of forms and evolved to the intelligent, functioning humans we are today.
Darwin’s theory was scorned during the course of his lifetime simply because it wasn’t heard of. Who was he, a single man, to dare challenge an idea that had been established as the answer for thousands of years? We as the human race was always lead to follow one common belief, and though there are many different religions, they pretty much had one ideal in common, that we were under the guidance and influence of a higher deity. For hundreds of years we had even gone to the extent of war over such radical and “preposterous” ideas that would shake what had been the foundations of our world and our social beliefs as a whole. Darwin’s theory of evolution and the ideas of free choice between science as the answer and challenging religion were unacceptable. It wasn’t until many years after Darwin’s death that the theory of evolution was even looked at a second time and analyzed. It became studied, broken down, and picked apart until we came to think that perhaps Darwin could be right. Until we found evidence of this actually happening it was nothing more than just a silly idea by a man who thought outside the box and wanted greater answers. Now that science and religion have taken two different roles, but both are still followed, we accept Darwin’s theory as a possibility. It is not the answer to the question of our curious minds, it is simply an answer. It is up to the individual to choose which idea to believe and follow for their life.
Darwin goes to show how just one man can change the entire course of the world. He stood by his own ideals and questioned the world for something more. He sought his own answers and in turn used his conclusions to develop a theory that he thought could prove true. Even when the masses scoffed at Darwin’s ideas he stood his ground and held to his own thoughts because he believed them to be true. What Darwin probably didn’t realize that many, many years later his own thoughts and perceptions would quake the entire world. If the idea of evolution proved to be true, and that we were not created by a higher deity, then perhaps we were not bound to follow the will of a god? Though yes, we could still believe in a higher being, we could separate our faith from our own human will. We could use that faith as something to hold onto, such as our hopes or our dreams, but we could determine for ourselves how we should live our own lives. We as humans have this natural longing to want to do more.
“For as all the inhabitants of each country are struggling together with nicely balanced forces, extreme modifications in the structure or habits of one inhabitant would often give it an advantage over others; and still further modifications of the same kind would often still further increase the advantage. No country can be named in which all the native inhabitants are now so perfectly adapted to each other and to the physical condition under which they live, that none of them could anyhow be improved.” (Appleman 112-3) Not so much in the past, but in the present, we encourage change. We are constantly trying to improve the way we think and we question everything. We want to know more about the world we live in and our everything, even the tiniest swoosh of a branch, can affect how life determines us. We are curious. We use the thing we covet the most, our minds. Our minds are not only our greatest tool, but also our greatest weapon. We value knowledge as power. And we can use that power for the benefit or destruction of our societies and our world. Our minds guide us through our lives because they are the voices we hear inside our heads, it is what keeps us going when all seems hopeless and we want nothing more than to give up. What drives us is the knowledge that everything we are, know, and do is because it is what our minds crave. We believe that as we succeed we can succeed more. A country or a culture can fall prey to the guidance and influence of a leader who has pure want for power, or honestly want a better life for their people and strive to find ways to achieve such a high goal. We follow ideals as groups and cultures, or we can change the world for ourselves. We just have to embrace the idea that every single little action, decision, or thought that we have can influence our future.
We can change our own lives and in an offhanded way, we can change the lives of those around us. So perhaps we think like Darwin and other historical thinkers of the past and question, seek, and discover and perhaps we’ll reach the conclusion that we too have the power of change. We ourselves do not have to merely be followers, but even us, the simplest of people, can too embrace the ability and concept to change. What we choose to do with that power is another question.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuK2A1ZqoWs

The video that I have chosen to include in this revelation takes a different sort of turn from ideas that would probably be expected. I remember hearing this song one day in another class that reminded me of everything we had been discussing about making our own decisions and following our own beliefs, whether through religion or science, and I admire the song because if you really listen to the lyrics, they incorporate historical situations that resulted from one person taking control and changing the course of an entire country, and race’s life, such as the Holocaust. It also speaks of making free thinking decisions and breaking away from following the crowd and being your own leader. It talks of taking this idea of a single person influencing life and making what you will of it. It tells of the battle between creation and destruction, between right and wrong, and between power and weakness. I, being a person who strongly follows that I believe in all aspects of my life, chose to think outside the box and chose a video that reflects my abstract thinking.

Works Cited:Appleman, David. Darwin: Third Edition. New York: Norton and Company, 2001.



*Note* Due to the video's embedding being disabled upon request I couldn't phyiscally embed the video, but I could include the YouTube link so that you could be directed to the site to watch it.