We were born with five senses, our initial and most prevalent connections to
the world. Everyone is connected through these senses. We can share the medium
of worldly experience because, for the most part, the quality and function of a
sense varies very little between two healthy people. The sky is blue for
everyone who can see it. Science is a collection of these confirmable
observations. But for all of the understanding science has brought to the
world, its noble hammer has been used sparingly towards unity. We take what is
convenient from science and have ignored the research that confirms our
connection to everything. Our origin as a species and its connection to all
other facets of this world, as studied by Victorian scientist Charles Darwin,
should have cemented human connection with the natural world. Instead, it is
questioned and ignored.
Many people stare off into a sunset and wonder why we are so attracted to the
cascading colors in the sky. It is because we live and die by it. The sun feeds
the plants and animals that we later eat. Simplistic as that sounds, it puts
human beings level with the renegade sunflower protruding out of a large crack
in the cemented asphalt. As far as the sun is concerned, humans like flowers,
use their time to sustain life and reproduce it. So why can’t we stop looking
up? Our cells are programmed to recognize the sun’s importance. They remember,
even if we do not, that for life on this planet, the sun is critical.
Even now, the sun
caresses your skin without asking. With the near whole of society writing it
off as cancerous, the sun continues to weave into our cells, triggering them to
produce vitamin D, the nutrient whose absence makes it impossible for the body
to absorb other nutrients. The effect is the same in plants and other animals,
tree moss and even sea plankton. Charles Darwin rationalized that if all life
required the sun there must be a similar origin to all life. A connection
occurred to Charles Darwin: all life is a deviation from one another. Before
Darwin’s pilgrimage to the Galapagos Islands, paleontology had already
highlighted interesting connections between the fossil records of similar animals.
And after the brave voyage of the Beagle, the small and poorly funded vessel
Charles Darwin sailed on, the great Tree of Life started coming together. “[On
the Tree of Life] the green and budding twigs may represent existing species;
and those produced during each former year may represent the long succession of
extinct species. At each period of growth all the growing twigs have tried to
branch out on all sides, and to overtop and kill the surrounding twigs and
branches, in the same manner as species and groups of species have tried to
overmaster other species in the great battle for life” (Darwin 63). 
But this origin of species has very little to do with Adam and Eve. No Garden
of Eden, this tree of knowledge is anything but forbidden. His findings were
considered sacrilegious, his references added insult to injury. Our Victorian
hero, who saw the connection of all life and matter on earth, was being reduced
by idiotic Christianity, and still is today. How can we lead the world if we do
not understand it? Evolution is the foundation of biology, our life science,
which we use to treat, cure, and prevent decease. Natural selection describes
the inevitable order of organisms based on their effectiveness. It is the
driving mechanism for survival, prevalent in the gargantuan woolly mammoth or
microscopic virus. This is how the universe functions and is what hammers us
together. More than even thoughts, Darwin strung life together, revealing that
this world, so competitively enthralled, differently assembled, and dynamically
behaved, is bound together. But fear and vanity have corrupted Darwin’s divine
message. Many people, of varying religions, refuse to acknowledge this
biological unity and have missed the source of all beauty in world. “There is
grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally
breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this
planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so
simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been,
and are being evolved” (Darwin).
Charles Darwin can lead you to place without messiness, without the compounded
confusion of multiple creators or origins for this planet without venturing to
disprove them. Through the connection of all species and the exaltation of Homo
sapiens as the highest link in the evolutionary chain, he demands moral
understanding, a caring for all things around you, an acknowledgement for the
millions of years of struggle and adaptation that the simple sunflower
represents. Darwin is the ultimate liberation. He makes life precious.
Liberation as the goal, science and Darwin as my soul’s leader, these are
values worth living and dying for. Martin Luther King Jr. was asking for the
recognition of equality between black and white people, dying bravely to add a
crucial link in social connectiveness. (Ironically, Africans and
African-Americans might actually be physically superior.) It is an idea woven
into society and science alike. Proof of what people had always suspected of
themselves, we are not born equal, but born equally deserving.
Victorian scientist, Charles Darwin, should be remembered for ushering the idea
that the driving force in the fiber of your being, as innately personal as it
might feel, is the most common of traits. And if you value your life and the
struggle for survival, you must value all life around you. The subtly warming
parts of Thomas Hardy’s Jude, the Obscure hint at this, "be a good
boy, be kind to animals and birds, and read all you can." That was the
only untainted quality in Jude’s soul, the only part that lust, pride, or
alcohol could not touch. Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was
published in 1859 but failed sadly at uniting, even educated, people. There is
far greater suspicion that Darwin, not the Bible, is wrong. And thusly, the
contradictions of ideas have led to the abandonment of some observable
scientific proofs. The beak variations on the birds of the Galapagos Islands
are not accidental, inconsequential, or unnecessary. Moreover, since Darwin,
science has furthered the extent of our similarities by isolating the DNA
molecule. And as we further our understanding, the more evident it is becoming
that all life is intrinsically linked. Chimpanzees share about 96% of human
genetic code while the genetic variability between the author and reader is
less than .1%
A sunset represents the end of a day to a multitude of organisms on this
planet. Even some marine life is aware of when the sun sets. The sun’s light
bends differently as it sets, its prismatic effect splashing widely against the
darkening blue sky. Life is like that light. White light bends into blue,
green, red, yellow, purple, orange, and brown the way life branches into trees,
birds, ferns, flowers, lions, elephants, and people. The sun is the center of
our solar system much like a nucleus is the center of an atom. The universe has
hammered together matter in a meticulously coordinated way. Our origins are in
the stars, where heavier elements first came together. Living organisms are
connected like syllables from sound, without real care for distance, ethnicity,
size, shape, or religion. This planet is on a pilgrimage with an unknown
destination, a voyage that will not be successful without the collaborative
efforts of many to influence and learn from. That is what Charles Darwin
discovered, what runs through my veins, and is pumped out of heart and mouth.
This divine similarity, familiarity, relationship with everything, I could not
be without.