by Nicholas Cockayne

Created on: April 18, 2007

I believe the most important person to ever live was Charles Darwin.

Given the huge wealth of people who have had an impact on the world, both positively and negatively, it is incredibly hard to pick a single person above all the others. Yet if asked to name a single individual I would have to pick the English naturalist and author of the theory of evolution 'On the Origin of Species', Charles Darwin.

I know this is a highly contentious opinion, one that no doubt many of the more fundamentalist Christians who post on here would hotly contest. Yet Charles Darwin, for those that accept his theories of evolution, has changed the entire way in which humans view themselves in relation to all other creatures.

Not only do his theories effect how we view ourselves as a species in general, but also how we view all other living beings on the planet. To have altered our perceptions of humankind from a species divinely ordained as superior to all others, to a natural part of the process from which all other creatures also evolved is a major step in how we evaluate our own self worth as a species and how we perceive are relationship to our planet.

Despite the contention between those who believe in the Bible as literal truth and those who advocate the theory of evolution, Charles Darwin himself was a devout Christian for much of his life, only becoming agnostic after the death of his daughter Anne. Darwin himself never saw his theory of evolution and the Old Testament as mutually exclusive. To put it simply he believed that God was the 'why', the starting point of evolution, the creator, and not the 'how', the method by which humans have reached their present state.

Darwin's theories of evolution have also been (mis)applied to the study of sociology, spawning the movement of Social Darwinism which was used to defend theories such as imperialism, racism and colonialism. This is despite the fact that Darwin himself believed the theories of survival of the fittest should not be applied to society and that people should sympathy and understanding should be extended to all peoples, regardless of nation or race.

Therefore I believe that Charles Darwin, the man behind the theory of evolution who changed how we view ourselves and our species is one of the most important people to have ever lived.

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