The History and Contributions of: Charles Darwin

Charles Robert Darwin was born February 12th, 1809 at Shrewsbury, England, which is a small town roughly 60 miles south of Liverpool. He was the son of Susannah Wedgwood Darwin, daughter of the founder of the Wedgwood china business, and Robert Waring Darwin (1766-1848), a country physician. He was the grandson of Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802), a successful and wealthy physician who, in the 18th century, wrote the book, Zoonomia (Laws of Life), which portrays a pantheistic world in which all life and species evolved, and of the potter Josiah Wedgwood. On July 15th, 1817, when Darwin was just eight years old, his mother passed away, leaving his sister responsible for raising him.

As far as his education is concerned, Darwin attended Rev. Case's Unitarian day school at Shrewsbury from 1818-25 and then Dr. Butler's boarding school at Shrewsbury from 1825-27. He was then sent to Edinburgh University in Scotland, to study to become a physician, continuing the tradition of his father and grandfather. Here Darwin met and studied with Robert Grant (1793-1874), a defender of Lamarckian evolution. Darwin was especially interested in natural history, but little inclined to medicine, in part due to the fact that he could not stand the sight blood and witnessing surgery performed without anesthesia repelled him. In 1828, he was sent by his father to Christ’s College, where he was to study for the clergy, after which his father planned to purchase for him a "living" in an Anglican country church. There he could be a sportsman, a scholar, or an amateur naturalist, supported by a government stipend for life. Darwin surely saw the hypocrisy in an atheist father's financing his son's preparation to be a minister of the gospel. Charles dutifully signed onto the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England and entered Cambridge. Darwin was more interested, however, in collecting plants, insects, and geological specimens than theology. Although studying for a degree in theology, Darwin put his greatest energies into geology and other natural sciences. In December of 1831 Darwin passed his baccalaureate exam and received his theology degree. He continued one more term in the college studying geology.

In 1831, at the age of 22, Darwin was invited by a captain in the British Royal Navy Robert Fitz-Roy (1805-65) to be an unpaid naturalist aboard the H. M. S.Beagle, a small British ship scheduled for a two-year scientific expedition to the Pacific coast of South America. Darwin’s scientific inclinations were encouraged by his botany professor, John Stevens Henslow, who was instrumental, despite heavy paternal opposition, in securing a place for Darwin aboard the Beagle. The two-year voyage turned into a five-year journey, with the ship setting sail on December 31st, 1831 and returning back to England on October 2nd, 1836. Darwin had been away from home for five years, and he would never leave England again.

The large collections of specimens of rocks, fossils, plants, fish, marine invertebrates, insects, birds and land animals that Darwin sent back to England, made him famous before his return. Once back in England, Darwin stayed first in Cambridge, then, in December of 1836, Charles moved to London, where he prepared his collections of fossils and specimens, gathered while aboard the Beagle, and conducted thorough research of his notes for scientific publications. Out of this study grew several related theories: one, evolution did occur; two, evolutionary change was gradual, requiring thousands to millions of years; three, the primary mechanism for evolution was a process called natural selection; and four, the millions of species alive today arose from a single original life form through a branching process called "specialization." He set these theories forth in his book called, "On the Origin of the Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life" (1859) or "The Origin of the Species" for short.

The process of formulating a book based on his findings while aboard the Beagle was evolutionary in itself. After five years of collecting the evidence, he began to speculate on the subject. In 1842 he drew up his observations in some short notes, expanded in 1844 into a sketch of conclusions for his own use. These embodied the principle of natural selection, the basis of the Darwinian Theory, but with typical caution he delayed publication of his hypothesis. However, in 1858 Alfred Russel Wallace sent him a memoir of the Malay Archipelago, which, to Darwin's surprise, contained in essence the main ideas of his own theory of natural selection. Lyell and Joseph Hooker persuaded him to submit a paper of his own, based on his 1844 sketch, which was read simultaneously with Wallace's before the Linnean Society in 1858. Neither Darwin nor Wallace was present on that historic occasion. Darwin then set to work to condense his vast mass of notes, and put into shape his great work, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, published in 1859. On November 24th, 1859 the book appeared in the London bookshops. At the end of the day, all 1,250 copies of the first printing had been sold. Darwin's Earth-shattering work was violently attacked because it did not agree with the account of creation given in the Book of Genesis. But eventually it succeeded in obtaining recognition from almost all biologists.

On January 29th, 1839 Darwin had married Emma Wedgwood (1808-96), a cousin and member of the family known for its pottery works and opposition to slavery in the British Empire. Their first of eight children, William, had been born on December 27th, 1839. Darwin, being the diligent observer that he was, seized the opportunity and began to document his son's development. The end result of his data collecting was eventually published in 1877 as "The Biographical Sketch of an Infant" in the second number of the first psychology journal; Mind: Quarterly Review of Psychology and Philosophy. In 1842, Charles and Emma had moved to Downe, a small town 15 miles outside of London. Plagued with an illness now believed to have been Chagas's disease contracted from an insect bite he received while in South America, Darwin lived out the rest of his life suffering from fatigue and intestinal sickness. Despite his poor condition, Darwin continued to write and publish his works including; The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication (1868), Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871), and The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) to name a few. Darwin died, aged 73, on April 19, 1882 and lies buried in Westminster Abbey, the most famous church in Britain. He is buried near the tombs of other such famous English citizens as, poet Geoffrey Chaucer, and physicist Isaac Newton.

“You care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family.” - Robert Waring Darwin to son Charles

"A man who dares to waste an hour of life has not discovered the value of life." - Charles Robert Darwin

Down House: Home To Charles Darwin for 40 years

Meet Tha Maker: Skot Jervis

References

You Are Lucky Visitor #

Since 1/8/99