Science Quiz: On Charles Darwin

1 / 5 |
Charles Darwin originally went to the University of Edinburgh to study ________, but he disliked the experience so much that he left, but not before he learnt taxidermy from the British taxidermist John Edmonstone. In his second year, Darwin began to focus on natural history. Fill in the blank.

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The voyage that shaped Darwin’s science was the second expedition of the HMS ______, in 1831-1836. He boarded as a young naturalist and spent years collecting specimens across South America and elsewhere. However, he didn’t instantly ‘discover’ evolution. The meaning of his findings became clear after further studies and expert inputs back in Britain. Fill in the blank.

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Darwin developed the core idea of natural selection years before publishing it. One important intellectual inspiration was X’s essay on population. Darwin applied the idea of people competing for limited resources in the essay to living organisms, helping him see how selection could operate continuously. Name X.

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Darwin’s major work, On the Origin of Species, was published in 1859 and sold out quickly. It proposed natural selection as a principal mechanism driving adaptation. Y independently arrived at a similar mechanism; his 1858 letter to Darwin prompted a joint presentation of their ideas at the Linnean Society of London. Name Y.

5 / 5 |
Darwin also wrote ___ _______ __ ___ in 1871, which extended evolutionary arguments to humans and introduced sexual selection, with traits shaped by mating success rather than just survival. Fill in the blanks.