Charles Darwin was an English naturalist and geologist. Although he studied theology and reached the Anglican ordi degree in 1831, natural sciences attracted him from the very beginning of his studies. This approach was intensified when he read Paley’s Natural Theology pointing out that God had designed anything on earth (living or dead). On the other side, contemporian literature was full of reports on expeditions into the natural forests in the tropics (e.g., Alexander von Humboldt’s South American travel reports). Darwin was so excited that he took part in courses on geology and other natural sciences. The chance to join on own costs the around the world expedition of the sailing vessel Beagle under Captain Fitzgerald (1831–1835) changed his life. Starting merely as a collector of specimens than as an interpreter of contexts or phenomena, the insights of this travel increased constantly his doubts in the official divine creation theory. Feeling to be torn between the Christian base of his life and that of the English society on one side and his increasing insights on an evolution in nature, Darwin kept back his insights for years. Only when Alfred Russel Wallace sent him in the year 1858 a proposed publication on ideas identical to his own, that the struggle for existence of species in a given biotope effects an artificial selection of those species which fit best to the given conditions, Darwin started finally to write down his insights in this field by publishing the famous book On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life after short articles had been published by him and Wallace in the year 1858 without obtaining much attention in the public.

This book became famous at once, and “Darwinism” changed the world but also initiated deep inner pressures in Darwin’s feeling to have delivered the base of atheism for himself and large parts of the world. He was strongly attacked by the public, and caricatures showed him close to monkeys (Fig. 1). On the other side, his strictly biological theory, which is proven today by modern molecular biological methods, was quickly misused by protagonists of the so-called social Darwinism and by eugenic movements promoting that some “human races” are better than others. His deep doubts in the existence of a “kind god” can be seen in the lines he wrote to the American naturalist Asa Gray:

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I own cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all side of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice.

The adaption of parasites to the biology of their hosts and to the environment proves all ideas involved from Darwin’s and Wallace’s insights (Fig. 2).

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