Natural Selection and the Human Race.
Did Darwin, a trained minister in the Church of England, believe that the conclusions reached by his research applied to humans as well as animals? When reading Natural Selection, one notices no mention of humans in terms of the process of selection, how might the principles at work on animals also work on people? .
As far as the second question is concerned, Darwin certainly believed that Natural Selection applied to humans as well. Darwin, aware of probable reactions from theologians of the time, omitted any mention of the possibility from his work On the Origin of the Species by Means of Natural Selection as a means to reach as large an audience as possible. Expounding upon it later, in his second book The Decent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex. The controversy initiated by his work is still very much debated today. A good deal of the resistance to Darwin springs from both a misunderstanding of Darwin's theories, and a resistance to view ourselves in a totally objective manner, more specifically including ourselves in the animal kingdom. .
.
There are countless theories as to how the principles of natural selection affects and has affected human beings some of the more fascinating (albeit controversial) have to do with man's evolution to a bipedal position. One theory, and usually the most accepted, suggests the process started when ancestors of homo sapiens moved from the jungle/wooded areas into flatter, more sparse terrain. Being introduced to higher grass and less trees, the need to see further distances would have spurred the need to stand for longer and longer periods of time upon the hind legs, those whose anatomy was more conducive to this ability would have had a greater chance of survival due simply to the fact that he would have been more apt to avoid predators. Another theory for this feature rests on the proposition that at one time, our ancestors would have spent much of their time in coastal areas, spending large amounts of time actually in the water.