Special Guest Blogger: Charles Darwin

When i was at school, we were taught that us humans and all the animals arrived here unrelated, made by God who made everything all perfectly created but one day while looking at a picture of a monkey i thought, hang on, that monkey looks just like my Uncle Herbert and so began my first steps into the theory of evolution.
I joined HSM Beagle and watched the wildlife as we sailed around the World for five years eating armadillo and rats when the food ran short and noticed while gnawing on an armadillo thigh that the finch in Australia looked very similar to the ones in Brazil and the foxes in South Africa were remarkably like the ones i saw in Chile and i thought...hmmm.
I came up with the idea that each of these animals were the same but in order to survive, they had evolved to blend with their surroundings so the finches in different places with different foods to eat, over time, developed different beaks and the foxes in Chile had developed a white coat to blend with the snow capped mountains while the successful South African ones had grown red coats to blend with the sandy environment.
The ones who failed to adapt, or evolve, survived and i found evidence of more and more of it as we sailed around.
The Giant tortoises in the Galapagos Islands were identical to the ones we had back home in England but the shells were a different pattern and i wrote about it in my journals which was going great until the Church of England heard about them and were outraged that i was proposing that we came from apes and that one species does change into another, as it meant that God did not create us at all.
I published my Origin of Species setting out detailed observations and making the case for common descent, including evidence between humans and apes.
The Church dismissed it at first, sticking to their original God-did-it theory as mine made people think and that was the last thing the Church wanted.
There are some who still go with the God theory which only goes to prove my theory that some humans are still a lot closer to having the brains of a monkey than the rest of us but give them a few more thousands years and they will  probably figure it out.
My life's work showed that after 4 billion years of success, with each generation learning from the one before, some humans sure don't act like it.