/. . . . When Charles Darwin made his celebrated voyage on HMS Beagle, he traveled as an acolyte of Humboldt, envious and emulous of the earlier scientific traveler’s journey to America. Even so, Darwin ended up taking Malthus’s side against Humboldt’s happier reading of new world places. Reflecting on his journey down and through South America, continuing on to Australia and around the world, Darwin cited the 1826 edition of the ‘Essay on the Principle of Population.’ From it, he concluded that however many new world natives had survived conquest, whatever new world gain might be grown to feed them and other eaters, “Wherever the Europeans had trod, death seemed to pursue the aboriginal.” And from that new world observation, supported that Malthus’s restatement of Franklin on funnel running riot over land that had been “cleared” the competitors, Darwin derived his theory of evolution based on natural selection, complete with the bleak prospect of extinction. Daniel Malthus’s desire that his younger son produce scientific knowledge had paid off, though neither of them were ever to know it. ~ Page 268
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Dinesh said: