Zachary Dougherty
Dr. Coggin
10/29/12
A heated topic in many English or research classes is the validity of the very commonly known site Wikipedia. Students tend to argue that it is a valid source of information while teachers lean towards the other end of the spectrum. Below is a biography written on Charles Darwin using information from Wikipedia alone.
Darwin was born in Shrewsbury in England on February 12th of 1809. He was raised in an Unitarian church, but was baptized in an Anglican church. When Charles was about eight years old his mother died. In 1827 he start to study theology at Christ's College in Cambridge. His love to collect plants, insects, and geological specimen was noted by his botany professor John Stevens Henslow. He arranged for his talented student to attend a surveying expedition of HMS Beagle to Patagonia. Despite his father not wanting him to do so, Darwin decided to leave his familiar surroundings to pursue his studies. The voyage lasted from 1831 to 1836. Darwin returned with observations he had made in Teneriffe, the Cape Verde Islands, Brazil, the Galapagos Islands, and a plethora of other places. During the voyage he had become ill with a tropical illness, which handicapped for the rest of his life. In 1839 he had married his cousin Emma Wedgwood. In the 1840s Darwin worked on his observations of the origin of species for his own use. He began to conclude that species might share a common ancestor. In 1842, Darwin moved to a house in Downe. By 1846 Darwin had published several works based on the discoveries of the voyage and he became secretary of the Geological Society.
Darwin's great work, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection was heavily criticized because it did not support the depiction of creation given in the bible. Darwin's argument that natural selection worked automatically, leaving little or no room for divine guidance or design; He reasoned all species produce far too many offspring for them all to