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Human Evolution theory Charles Darwin, whom many people consider to have been the originator of Evolutionary Theory
as applicable both to animal life generally and to Humanity in particular, actually shares with Alfred Russel Wallace the attribution for
independent development of Modern Evolutionary Theory. Neither of them were to be the first
to go so far as to explicitly take the step of subjecting Mankind to Evolutionary Theory speculations.As a young man Darwin, born into quite a comfortable background as the son of a well-regarded and prosperous doctor based in Shrewsbury, England, was an avid beetle collector who abandoned medical studies after being appalled by the sufferings of patients undergoing the surgical techniques of the day, (without relief from anaesthetics), and then entered Christ's College, Cambridge, with the view of becoming a country parson. In those times it was quite accepted for clergymen to interest themselves in Natural History as part of God's creation. Whilst at Cambridge his interest in Natural History led to informal contacts with professors of Botany and Geology and, through these contacts, to an invitation to join HMS Beagle on an exploratory voyage to South America and beyond as a geologist. During this voyage 1831-1836 he lost his faith and emerged from it as a recognised man of science. The Beagle voyage gave him a wide background in Natural History. As early as July 1837 Darwin opened a notebook to record his thoughts on "that mystery of mysteries - the origin of species" as this entry from his diary relates:- In July I opened my first note-book for facts in relation to the Origin of Species, about which I had long reflected, and never ceased working on it for the next twenty years.The direction of the development of Darwin's thoughts can perhaps be illustrated by this famous Tree of Life sketch from his Notebook B dating from 1837-8:- 
Charles Darwin's early evolutionary theory insight of how a branching tree-like genus of related species might
originate by divergence from a starting point (1) to effectively establish related species at such notional points as A, B, C and D.
There is an accompanying text annotation that reads:- I think Case must be that one generation then should be as many living as now. To do this & to have many species in same genus (as is) requires extinction. Thus between A & B immense gap of relation. C & B the finest gradation, B & D rather greater distinction. Thus genera would be formed. — bearing relation (page 36 ends - page 37 begins) to ancient types with several extinct forms. From Darwin's notebook B now stored in Cambridge University library. Darwin had grown up in and, despite his own skepticism after returning from his voyages, continued to live in a society that generally accepted biblical explanations of creation whereby the Earth and all of its unchanging, immutable, life forms - including Human Beings - were, as they were and as they ever had been, as a result of Original Acts of Divine Creation. Against this pervasive cultural background, in a confidential letter of 11 January 1844 to a fellow scientist named Joseph Hooker, Darwin wrote that:- I have been now ever since my return engaged in a very presumptuous work & which I know no one individual who wd not say a very foolish one.— I was so struck with distribution of Galapagos organisms &c &c & with the character of the American fossil mammifers, &c &c that I determined to collect blindly every sort of fact, which cd bear any way on what are species.— I have read heaps of agricultural & horticultural books, & have never ceased collecting facts— At last gleams of light have come, & I am almost convinced (quite contrary to opinion I started with) that species are not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable. Heaven forfend me from Lamarck nonsense of a “tendency to progression” “adaptations from the slow willing of animals” &c,—but the conclusions I am led to are not widely different from his— though the means of change are wholly so— I think I have found out (here's presumption!) the simple way by which species become exquisitely adapted to various ends.— You will now groan, & think to yourself ‘on what a man have I been wasting my time in writing to.’— I shd, five years ago, have thought so.— 
Alfred Russel Wallace was acquainted with Charles Darwin and had forwarded specimens he had collected to Darwin. Darwin was a great writer of
letters and had corresponded intermittently with Wallace.
And so it was that Wallace, who had independently arrived at an evolutionary theory in 1858 whilst he was laid up with a malarial fever at Ternate, in the Celebes Islands where he had been collecting biological specimens, sent a twenty page long memoir about this evolutionary theory he had devised to the influential expert amateur naturalist Charles Darwin, which arrived at Darwin's house in Kent in June 1858. In a covering letter Wallace asked that Darwin forward the memoir to a famous scientist named Sir Charles Lyell, if Darwin thought the content merited Lyell's attention. Wallace had concluded that species throw up occasional variations in form which may decisively benefit the individuals who carry that variation. He, like Darwin years earlier, had been struck by a viewpoint attributable to Thomas Malthus, which held that populations will tend to outstrip the food supply naturally available to them. Again, like Darwin, Wallace envisaged a relentless favouring in terms of short term survival and longer term breeding opportunities being naturally bestowed on those individuals that bore variant traits that favoured the winning of scarce food for their day-to-day sustenance. Darwin forwarded Wallace's memoir to Lyell. Sir Charles Lyell was actually one of Darwin's personal friends and knew that Darwin had long been working in the same area of study. In the event Lyell and other scientific friends of Darwin's agreed a compromise where both Darwin and Wallace would be enabled to share in the release of the Theory of Evolution for public consideration and thus put both of them on academic record as being responsible for its development. Neither Wallace nor Charles Darwin were present at the meeting of the Linnaean Society in July 1858 when papers attributable to each were brought to the attention of the wider scientific community.  Following on from Wallace's approach of 1858 Darwin made
efforts to draw his notes together into a work intended for
publication. That work was prepared and published under the title
On the
Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life was first published on 24 November 1859.
There were only 1,250 copies prepared in this first edition, and Darwin had suggested to his publisher that even this would be too many for what he presumed to be a limited and specialised scientific market. Although the book was priced at fourteen shillings - more than a week's wages for a labouring man and hence beyond most persons convenient means - and its content was slightly technical this edition sold out to the book trade on the day of publication. A second edition of 3,000 copies was issued some two months later. Few books have had such a profound and far-reaching impact on Human Society across the world. In this work Darwin concentrated on "Descent with modification" as having been extremely influential in giving rise to new species of animal life generally and with no particular focus on Humanity. Darwin work suggested that there had been an initial creation but with many subsequent evolutionary modifications over vast periods of time. Perhaps the most explicit mention of humans as being themselves subject to evolutionary processes occurs in this passage from one of the closing paragraphs of Origin of Species. "The whole history of the world, as at present known, although of a length quite incomprehensible by us, will hereafter be recognised as a mere fragment of time, compared with the ages which have elapsed since the first creature, the progenitor of innumerable extinct and living descendants, was created.The publication of Darwin's evolutionary theory, as set out in the Origin of Species, was followed by intense public debate where fully Creationist Faith went head to head with Science's newly proposed Evolution Theory. Gradually mankind became the explicit focus of evolutionary theory speculation. Sir Charles Lyell's The Antiquity of Man was published in early February 1863 and detailed the discoveries of traces of early man dating from the palaeolithic era. In this work which sold well and, "shattered the tacit agreement that mankind should be the sole preserve of theologians and historians", Lyell avoided any definitive statement on human evolution. Later that year a work entitled Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature by Thomas Henry Huxley was the first book devoted to the topic of human evolution, and discussed much of the anatomical and other evidence for the evolution of man and apes from a common ancestor. Huxley's work featured the following frontispiece:-
It was in 1871 that Darwin's first explicit work on Human Evolutionary theory was published. In this work, Descent of Man, Darwin attempted to persuade the reader of mankind's evolutionary heritage. Darwin started his Chapter I of this work, itself entitled "The evidence of the descent of man from some lower form" with the sentence "It is notorious that man is constructed on the same general type or model as other mammals..."
In our own times evolutionary theory is widely
The Faith versus Reason DebateThe Wisdoms and Insights available on our
If Charles Darwin were alive today we at Age-of-the-Sage would be urgently seeking to interest him in our discovery of the fact that there is close agreement between several major World Faiths, Plato, Socrates, Pythagoras and Shakespeare in suggesting that Human Wisdom / Spirituality is relative to Human Desire / Materialism and to Human Wrath / Ethnicity.
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