Have you ever been proposed with the question, which celebrity would you want to meet in the afterlife? Most would choose their favorite idols or actor/actresses, but my choice would be somebody who in today’s society wouldn’t be considered a celebrity by those who hold their faith close to their hearts, or choose to ignore his work in the sciences. Though his theories may have started a war within America’s education system, I still would love to meet the famous naturalist, Charles Darwin.

                His revolutionary book, “Origin of Species” certainly made him the pioneer for the natural sciences. Without his contributions, who knows how far advance our science studies would be today. One of his main focuses in his book was the argument of natural selection. Darwin believed it was a combination of both the environment and the survival of the fittest that gave species their variations within each of a population. His main point was to dispute that all species are fixed.

                On page eighty-three of William Bynum’s edited edition of Darwin’s Origin of Species, Darwin goes on to describe natural selection as “daily and hourly scrutinizing, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all the that is good; silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offer s, at the improvement of each organic being in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life.” (p. 83). Even though Darwin makes natural selection sound alive, it’s merely a simile he uses to make his argument easier to understand. Obviously natural selection isn’t a living being, but a driven force that has always seemed to exist within nature. It’s the species themselves that makes those changes within their own populations. And those attributes that are rejected and preserved are the physical and cultural adaptations a species can lose or obtain. The “bad” are the adaptations which hinder an organism’s way of life, while the “good” are the adaptations that give it the upper hand. Also notice with just this once sentence he uses a lot of breaks (commas and semicolons). I believe the reason for this is because by reading this passage, each break is used to envision a scene where natural selection is at work. It’s a moment to pause and contemplate the idea in more detail, rather than moving on and forgetting the entire statement. Darwin wanted his readers to understand his theory, even if the reader didn’t have a scientific background.

                So if I ever do get the chance to meet this brilliant man, one of my first questions I would ask him is if he’s ever had the chance to read Mendel’s work on genetics. Mendel’s work was made public within Darwin’s lifetime, and it held the answer to Darwin’s most troubling problem he was faced with while writing his own theory. Mendel found the basis for genetics, and if Darwin were to have took the time to read Mendel’s proposed experiments with pea plants, then who knows what kind of scientific breakthroughs Darwin could have had!