Tattoo inspired from Darwin’s notebook around July 1837 that showed his first sketch of an evolutionary tree.
Today people around the world celebrates the 204 Anniversary of Charles Darwin birth. To me this day is special and I celebrate the life and work of this great man by sharing with you the WHY he is history’s most important thinker.
Throughout his life, Darwin’s work resulted in the most enormous benefits that scientific knowledge, acquired through human curiosity and ingenuity, ever contributed to the advancement of humanity. Darwin gave us the research and opened the doors for human inquiry by founding the unifying theory of Biology: Evolution. He was the first to present convincing evidence of it and its major driving force – natural selection.
The general idea of evolution preceded Darwin, and he shied away from making the explicit and incendiary claim that even humans were evolved from other creatures. But his explanation of natural selection as a mechanism that made evolution plausibly able to explain the origin of species without reference to a creator up-ended the contemporary orthodoxy. It set a new course that no subsequent scientific work could ignore. And according to the eminent late evolutionary biologistErnst Mayr, “Eliminating God from science made room for strictly scientific explanations of all natural phenomena; it gave rise to positivism; it produced a powerful intellectual and spiritual revolution, the effects of which have lasted to this day.”
Eugene Byrne and Simon Gurr wanted to celebrate Darwin’s lifelong spirit of curiosity and bring the message to kids with their new graphic novel.
The human population on planet Earth has reached for the first time in history 7 billion as reported by the United Nations[1]. As of today, October 28, 2011 at 16:44 (GMT+1) it was estimated to be 6.92 billion by the United States Census Bureau[2] and you can check their World Population Clock. and 7 billion by . But also, we can also acknowledge that this is also the first time in human history in which most humans have access to medical services, potable water, electricity.
As Susa Lewis from Nova acknowledges, “For most of human existence our ancestors led precarious lives as scavengers, hunters, and gatherers, and there were fewer than 10 million human beings on Earth at any one time. Today, many cities have more than 10 million inhabitants each, and populations continue to skyrocket.”
Source: United Nations, World Urbanization Prospects: The 2007 Revision.
Also, the UN World Urbanizaiton Prospects reviewed that “Through most of history, the human population has lived a rural lifestyle, dependent on agriculture and hunting for survival. In 1800, only 3 percent of the world’s population lived in urban areas. By 1900, almost 14 percent were urbanites, although only 12 cities had 1 million or more inhabitants. In 1950, 30 percent of the world’s population resided in urban centers. In 2008, for the first time, the world’s population was evenly split between urban and rural areas. There were more than 400 cities over 1 million and 19 over 10 million. More developed nations were about 74 percent urban, while 44 percent of residents of less developed countries lived in urban areas.”
World Population Cartogram
Nova has the following interactive map in which you can trace the dramatic growth of human populations over recent centuries, and see where on Earth as many as three billion more people may live by 2050.
New challenges for humans will continue appearing with so many of us living here. However, it is not the number what really matters but how we are all going to live here. Currently, Thomas Malthusfamous argument from 1798 in which he said “that population growth was a critical problem, reasoning that because human population grows exponentially while our food supplies grow linearly, that our growth would lead to massive problems” has already been proven wrong.
But what has still not being solved is the current philosophical crisis in which we live. For a great part of human history, the world has been ruled by a collectivist philosophy of life that in the words of Ayn Rand “promoted the subjugation of the individual to a group (kings, oligarchs, nobility, religions, patrimonialists, corporations, parties, communities)—whether to a race, class or state does not matter. Collectivism holds that man must be chained to collective action and collective thought for the sake of what is called “the common good.” The previous sentences are very important and cannot be passed without understanding its historical results. You can further explore them in the work of Leonard Peikoff titled “The Ominous Parallels“.
For more information regarding human population check the following links:
Globalization & Capitalism 