Impact of Darwinian Theory on Geographical Thought – UGC NET – Notes

• In geography, Darwinism was interpreted primarily as evolution, in the sense of a ‘continuous process of change in a temporal perspective long enough to produce a series of transformations’. Darwin was primarily concerned with the mechanism of the change, or as The Origin was subtitled, the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life’. This ‘element of struggle’ was applied in a deterministic way, particularly in human geography, at about the same period.
• In both physical and human geography, supposedly Darwinian ideas were applied in an eighteenth rather than a nineteenth century fashion, and geographers were still applying essentially Newtonian views of causation well into the twentieth century. The Darwinian evolution seemed to have provided fresh incentive to concepts of biological origin which date back to Ritter and before, and the subsequent development of ecology led to new insights in some branches of geographical scholarship.

Five Impacts of Darwin on the development of geographical concepts are:

1. Impact on Geomorphology
2. Impact on Landschaft
3. Impact on Human Geography
4. Impact on Political Geography
5. Impact on Cultural Landscape

Born on February 12, 1809 at the Mount Shrewsbury, Shropshire (England), Darwin was a naturalist. He is renowned for his theory of evolution and for a theory of its operation, known as Darwinism. His evolutionary theories, propounded chiefly in two works:

1. Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859), and
2. Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871).

• His theories greatly influenced the scientific and religious tenor of his time.
• Darwin’s father, Robert Warning was a distinguished physician. He was brought up by his eldest sister from the age of eight. Darwin after an early life that showed little promise of his later prominence, he developed an interest in natural history. He got his education in medicine at the University of Edinburgh. Subsequently, he shifted to the Cambridge University where he obtained his degree in medicine in 1831 with no special distinction.
• In 1831, Darwin sailed with an expedition as a naturalist to South America and Pacific Islands. The objective of his travel was to survey the wildlife of the west coast of South America.
• During this five year trip he became convinced of the gradual evolution of species. Upon his return to England, he worked for 20 years refining his ideas before he started to write a definitive account of evolution in 1856 which he published in 1959 as Origin of Species. His later days were spent in much physical discomfort as he suffered from ‘Chagas’ disease, which he had contacted while in South America.
• Darwin’s genius was not confined solely to questions of evolution. He explored many other natural phenomena, including the taxonomy of branches, the formation of atolls and barrierreefs, and the role of earthworms in soil fertility. His other works include Variation in Animals and Plants under Domestication (1868) and the Descent of Man…. He died on April 19, 1882, at Down House, Downe, Kent (England). At the time of Darwin’s death there was no longer any controversy over his greatness and he was buried in West minister Abbey, London.
• Charles Darwin propounded the theory of evolution which revolutionized the biological, environmental and earth sciences. His theory of evolution involved commitment to common organic descent, gradualism and multiplication of species. He also spoke of natural selection, family selection, correlative variation, use inheritance and directed variation. Darwin explained how the multitude of living things in our world so finely adapted to their environment, could have come into being without recourse to a divine master plan, in a plain, causal, naturalistic way. Darwin argued that a struggle for existence must take; it followed that those who survived were better adapted to their environments than competitors. This was essentially a theory of reproductive success in which relatively superior adaptations increase while relatively inferior ones are steadily eliminated. A similar theory was simultaneously put forward by Alfred Russel Wallace (18231913) who surveyed the islands of South-East Asia. Stoddart (1966) suggests that the following four main themes from Darwin’s work can be traced in later geographical research:

1. Change through time or evolution: a general concept of gradual or even transition from lower to higher or more complicated forms. Darwin used the terms ‘evolution’ and ‘development’ essentially in the same sense.
2. Association and organisation: humanity as part of a living ecological organism.
3. Struggle and natural selection.
4. The randomness or chance character of variation in nature. Darwin, who rejected the teleological approach of Ritter and the theological concept in vogue about the origin of man and other species influenced significantly the growth and development of the concepts of geography both in the physical and human geography.