Brief Biography of Charles Darwin
Personal Life
Charles Robert Darwin was born on February 12, 1809, the fifth of six children, in Shrewsbury, Shropshire, England. His paternal grandfather was Erasmus Darwin and his maternal grandfather was Josiah Wedgwood (of pottery fame). In 1825, he went with his brother, Erasmus, to the University of Edinburgh to study medicine. Darwin largely ignored his medical studies in favor of taxidermy and natural history to the annoyance of his father. In January 1828, he started at Christ’s College, Cambridge with the aim of eventually becoming an Anglican parson. There he became friends with John Henslow, a botany professor and famous naturalist, and studied natural theology, which argues that nature reveals divine design. He also studied geology and went into the field to map strata in Wales before returning in 1831 to find a letter inviting him to join the voyage of the Beagle (discussed below).
Eventually, in November 1838, two years after the return of the Beagle, Darwin proposed to his cousin, Emma Wedgwood; they married two months later. They eventually moved to Down house in Kent in 1842. They had ten children two of whom died in infancy, to whom Darwin was devoted. Darwin worried each time that his children were ill that their problems stemmed from inbreeding due to the close genetic relationship between him and his wife. His daughter Annie’s death at 10 hit Darwin particularly hard. Throughout his life he published extensively on diverse topics including geology, barnacles, botany, domestication and other topics. He died in Downe, Kent, England on April 19, 1882 and was granted a state funeral (one of only five non-royal people granted this honor in the 19th century) and buried in Westminster Abbey.
The Beagle and Back
Darwin joined the voyage of the HMS Beagle in 1831 as a companion to the captain, Robert Fitzroy. Darwin spent much of the nearly five year journey on land studying geology and collecting specimens. He sent these specimens back to Cambridge periodically along with the detailed notes that he had taken. In South America Darwin encountered the fossils of extinct mammals next to those of extant seashells and observed two species of rhea with overlapping but separate territories among other observations. Darwin also traveled with the Beagle to the Galapagos where he encountered mockingbirds that resembled those found on the South American mainland but which differed between islands. He also encountered tortoises whose shells, as he had been told, differed from island to island. The crew of the Beagle used these tortoises as food so Darwin had plenty of shells to observe, however, he did not remember this variation until later when many of the shells had been discarded.
By the time the Beagle returned on October 2, 1836 Darwin was already well known for his geological letters which Henslow had circulated. Back in the UK Darwin met Charles Lyell whose work on geology had influenced Darwin throughout the journey of the Beagle and laid out uniformitarian conceptions of the land gradually rising and falling throughout time as it had since the beginning of time. Lyell would remain Darwin’s friend for decades. In January 1837 John Gould, an ornithologist, announced that the birds Darwin thought were a mixture of blackbirds, grosbeaks and finches were actually twelve species of finches which, like the mockingbirds, varied across islands. Darwin had not kept notes on which island he collected each finch from but was able to determine their origins using FitzRoy’s notes and others.
Publishing the Origin
By mid-March of 1837 Darwin had already started to formulate ideas about species changing into one another and by mid June he was hypothesizing about variation in offspring as a mechanism for species to adapt to change. In 1838 he noted that variation that conferred an advantage in survival would be maintained and passed on to future generations while other variants would be lost. He steadily worked on his theories and had formulated many of his thoughts by 1844 when Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation was published creating controversy and public interest in transmutation. Darwin continued working on his theory of natural selection, all the while publishing on the findings from the Beagle voyage, barnacles, geology and other topics.
It was not until June 18, 1858, 20 years after the return of the Beagle, his big book on natural selection partially complete, that Darwin felt compelled to publish his theory. In this month he received a paper from Alfred Russel Wallace in which Wallace laid out the theory of natural selection. With the help of his botanist friend, Joseph Hooker, and Lyell, Darwin rushed to publicize his theory. On July 1 Hooker and Lyell presented Darwin and Wallace’s joint work to the Linnean society (neither Darwin nor Wallace was present). There was minimal immediate reaction to the presentation. Famously the president of the Linnean society remarked that 1858 was a year without any remarkable discoveries. On November 1859 Darwin released his On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (abbreviated On the Origin of Species). This book was essentially one long argument and proved to be incredibly popular.
Response to the Origin
Immediately after publication The Origin of Species stirred a lot of controversy. Some of Darwin’s former teachers from Cambridge rejected the ideas but liberal clergymen accepted Darwin’s natural selection as a tool of God. Some religious figures praised Darwin’s theory in print and saw no contradiction between natural selection and natural theology. One of the most famous events in the wake of publication was the 1860 Oxford evolution debate in which Thomas Huxley gained his nickname “Darwin’s bulldog” in his debate against Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce. Huxley vehemently defended Darwin’s theory and famously claimed that he “would rather be descended from an ape than from a cultivated man who used his gifts of culture and eloquence in the service of prejudice and falsehood.” Huxley was particularly opposed to religious authority in education and scientific matters and successfully undermined much of the dominance that the clergy had in science. The Origin of Species became popular with people from a variety of backgrounds and influenced much of the evolutionary theory that followed it. Subsequent publications from authors other than Darwin reinforced his theory by, among other things, demonstrating that humans are anatomically apes and providing empirical support for natural selection.
Legacy
In the years following the publication of The Origin of the Species, which was meant to serve merely as the abstract to a larger work, Darwin published many more works. These were parts of his larger “big book” and included Variation of Plants and Animals Under Domestication (1868), The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871) and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872). These works discussed how flowers control their pollinators, that humans are animals and one common species and the continuity of human psychology and animal behavior respectively. He also published about the movement of climbing plants and the effect of earth worms on soil formation before his death in 1882.
Darwin’s theories have been used over the last century and a half to enforce various social and political ideas including eugenics and social Darwinism. Darwin fought against the obvious eugenics implications of his work in The Descent of Man arguing that denying the weak help to survive and reproduce would endanger sympathy, one of man’s noblest qualities. Also, authors have argued that part of Darwin’s motivation in publishing The Origin is to emphasize the common bond of all men as a rejection of the slavery that he encountered in South America and that disgusted him. Societal leaders have used Darwin’s theories in many, often contradictory, ways by emphasizing the struggle or the cooperation within species as justification for laissez faire economics and workhouses but also pacifism and socialism. Darwin himself was against basing social policy solely in natural principles of struggle and selection.
Summarized from the “Charles Darwin” Wikipedia article, accessed 31 January 2009. - Hannah Kim Frank