Charles Darwin

English naturalist

• Born: February 12, 1809
• Birthplace: Shrewsbury, Shropshire, England
• Died: April 19, 1882
• Place of death: Downe, Kent, England

A towering figure in natural history, Darwin developed a theory of evolution through natural selection that revolutionized biology by providing a scientific explanation for the origin and development of living forms.

Early Life

Charles Robert Darwin was born on February 12, 1809, in Shrewsbury, the fifth of six children. His mother, Susannah, the daughter of famed potter Josiah Wedgwood, died when he was eight, leaving him in the care of his elder sisters. His father, Robert Waring Darwin, was a robust and genial country doctor with a wide practice. In 1818, young Darwin entered Dr. Butler’s Shrewsbury School, where he learned some classics but little else. At home he was a quiet, docile child, with an interest in solitary walks and collecting coins and minerals.

In 1825, Darwin was sent to Edinburgh to study medicine, because his family hoped he would enter his father’s profession. He proved to be a poor student, showing little interest in anatomy and disliking the crude operations performed without anesthetics. When he left Shrewsbury, his father rebuked him, saying, “You care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family.”

As a last resort, the young Darwin was sent to Christ’s College, Cambridge, to prepare for the ministry, a profession for which he felt no more enthusiasm than he did for medicine, and he soon fell in among the sporting set. Though not a distinguished student, Darwin took an interest in natural science and was influenced by Alexander von Humboldt’s Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent During the Years 1799-1804 (1814-1829) and Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1830-1833). He met John Stevens Henslow, a botany professor who encouraged his interest in natural history and helped to secure for him a position as naturalist aboard HMS Beagle, soon to depart on a five-year scientific expedition around the world. The Beagle sailed from Devonport on December 31, 1831. Darwin’s experiences during the voyage from 1831 to 1836 were instrumental in shaping his theory of evolution.

The voyage of the Beagle took Darwin along the coast of South America, where twenty-nine months were spent charting the waters off the Pacific coast. Darwin explored the Andes and the pampas and kept detailed journals in which he carefully observed differences among the South American flora and fauna, particularly on the Galapagos Islands, where he found a remarkable divergence among the same species from different islands. Before he began his voyage, he had no reason to doubt the immutability of species, but from his firsthand experiences he gradually began to doubt the creationist view of life. He would later draw upon these extensive field observations to formulate his theory of natural selection . Darwin was able to draw together from his travels vast amounts of scientific evidence to buttress his arguments against scientific and religious challenges. When he returned to England on October 2, 1836, he was an accomplished naturalist, collector, and geologist with a new view of the natural history of life.

After his return to London, Darwin settled in an apartment and began a detailed study of coralreefs. He became secretary to the Geological Society and a member of the Royal Society. He married his first cousin, Emma Wedgwood, in January, 1839. Because his health was poor, the couple settled outside London, in Kent. Here, despite his infirmities, Darwin did his most important work. A thin man, about six feet tall, Darwin walked with a stoop that made him appear shorter, especially as his illness worsened later in life.

Life’s Work

At Downe House in Kent, Darwin worked for the next twenty years on his journals from the Beagle trip, gathering information to support his theory of evolution through natural selection. In 1837, Darwin had begun his first notebook on the “species question.”

A chance reading of Thomas Robert Malthus’s An Essay on the Principle of Population as It Affects the Future Improvement of Society (1798) in 1838 introduced Darwin to the idea of the struggle for existence, which Darwin thought applied better to plants and animals than to humans, who can expand their food supply artificially. Darwin had returned from his voyage with many unanswered questions. Why were the finches and tortoises different on each of the Galapagos Islands, even though the habitats were not that different? Why were similar creatures, such as the ostrich and the rhea, found on separate continents? Why did some of the South American fossils of extinct mammals resemble the skeletons of some living creatures? The species question fascinated him, and gradually Darwin formulated a theory of the mutability and descent of living forms, although he was still unsure about the mechanisms of adaptation and change.

Two preliminary sketches of 1842 and 1844 presented Darwin’s theory of evolution in rudimentary form, but he was determined to amass as much detail as possible to support his deductions. He turned to the work of animal breeders and horticulturalists for evidence of artificial selection among domesticated species. His preliminary work might have continued indefinitely if he had not received on June 18, 1854, an essay from Alfred Russel Wallace, a field naturalist in the Malay archipelago, outlining a theory of evolution and natural selection similar to his own. Darwin immediately wrote to his friends, Sir Charles Lyell and Joseph Hooker, explaining his dilemma and including an abstract of his own theory of evolution. Lyell and Hooker proposed that in order to avoid the question of precedence, the two papers should be presented simultaneously. Both were read before a meeting of the Linnean Society in Dublin on July 1, 1858, and were published together in the society’s journal that year.

Darwin then began writing an abstract of his theory, which he entitled On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection . All 1,250 copies sold out on the first day of publication in London on November 24, 1859. Darwin argued that because all species produce more offspring than can possibly survive, and because species populations remain relatively constant, there must be some mechanism working in nature to eliminate the unfit. Variations are randomly introduced in nature, some of which will permit a species to adapt better to its environment. These advantageous adaptations are passed on to the offspring, giving them an advantage for survival. Darwin did not understand the genetic mechanism by which offspring inherit adaptations. It would take another seventy years before the forgotten work of the Austrian geneticist Gregor Mendel was rediscovered and Sir Ronald Fisher integrated the theories of Darwinian selection and Mendelian genetics.

A quiet and retiring man, Darwin was surrounded by a storm of controversy after the publication of On the Origin of Species. Objection came both from orthodox clergy and unconvinced scientists. At Oxford in 1860, there was a famous debate on evolution between Thomas H. Huxley and Bishop Samuel Wilberforce, in which Huxley answered the creationist arguments against evolution and silenced the religious critics.

For the rest of his life, Darwin himself worked at home on orchid- and pigeon-breeding experiments and successive editions of On the Origin of Species, as well as further studies on plant and animal domestication, climbing plants, cross-fertilization, orchids, the expression of emotions, and his famous The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871). His wife, Emma, nursed him during his bouts of illness, whose origin is uncertain. She also reared their ten children, seven of whom survived to adulthood, three to become distinguished scientists and members of the Royal Society. In his later years, Darwin regretted the loss of his appreciation for poetry and music, complaining that his mind had become a “machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts.” Still, he maintained a wide correspondence and enjoyed entertaining close friends and occasional visitors at home. He died on April 19, 1882, at Downe House in Kent, and was buried with full honors in the scientists’ corner at Westminster Abbey, next to Sir Isaac Newton.

Significance

Perhaps more profoundly than any other single work, Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection shaped the development of modern biology and, more broadly, the modern view of human nature. No longer was it possible to accept uncritically the biblical view of creation, with the implied special place of humanity in the divine order. Man became a creature among creatures, with a traceable evolution and descent from earlier hominoid forms. Darwin’s ideas exerted a wide cultural influence, with a popular version of “the survival of the fittest” diffusing into the politics, literature, and sociology of the age, especially through Herbert Spencer’s “social Darwinism.”

Darwin’s ideas were often mistakenly used to justify racism, discrimination , and repressive laissez-faire economic practices. Though Darwin drifted toward agnosticism and did not believe in a divinely sanctioned morality, neither did he condone a world of amoral violence and brute struggle for domination. He believed that human morality was the product of humanity’s social and cultural evolution and that it did confer survival benefits. A gentle man who abhorred violence and cruelty, he would have been horrified at the political and social misapplications of Darwinian principles. Nevertheless, Darwin was not a Victorian liberal and accepted many of the unenlightened views of his age concerning “primitive” cultures.

During his lifetime, Darwin faced formidable challenges to his evolutionary theory, first from the scientist Fleeming Jenkin, who argued that fortuitous adaptations would be “swamped” and disappear in larger populations, and later from Lord Kelvin, who mistakenly questioned Darwin’s estimate of the geological age of the earth on the basis of the laws of thermodynamics. These challenges led Darwin to revise On the Origin of Species extensively in successive editions and to back away from some of his earlier claims about the long timespan needed for slow, evolutionary changes to take place. In order to accommodate Lord Kelvin’s shortened estimate of the earth’s age, Darwin moved toward a neo-Lamarckian position concerning the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Darwin had no way of knowing that Mendel’s discoveries in genetics would have answered many of his doubts about the sources of variation and the mechanisms of inheritance.

Darwin has had an immeasurable influence on the development of modern biology, ecology, morphology, embryology, and paleontology. His theory of evolution established a natural history of the earth and enabled humans to see themselves for the first time as part of the natural order of life. A lively debate continues among scientists about revisionist theories of evolution, including Stephen Jay Gould’s notion of “punctuated equilibria,” or sudden and dramatic evolutionary changes followed by long periods of relative stability. While they disagree about details, however, modern biologists agree that neoevolutionary theory remains the only persuasive scientific explanation for the diversity of life on earth.

Bibliography

Aydon, Cyril. Charles Darwin: The Naturalist Who Started a Scientific Revolution. New York: Carroll & Graf, 2002. Explains the theories described in On the Origin of the Species, and the subsequent debate over those ideas. Outlines the changing fortunes of Darwinian theories over the last two centuries.

Brachman, Arnold. A Delicate Arrangement: The Strange Case of Charles Darwin and Charles Russel Wallace. New York: Times Books, 1980. Brachman argues that Darwin and his friends conspired to deny Wallace credit for having first discovered the theory of biological evolution.

Clark, Ronald W. The Survival of Charles Darwin: A Biography of a Man and an Idea. New York: Random House, 1984. A study of Darwin’s life and work, concentrating on the genesis of evolutionary theory and its development after Darwin’s death.

Colp, Ralph, Jr. To Be an Invalid: The Illness of Charles Darwin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977. A detailed study of the various theories about what caused Darwin’s chronic, debilitating illness after the Beagle voyage.

Darwin, Charles. The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, 1809-1882. Edited by Nora Barlow. New York: W. W. Norton, 1969. A new edition of Darwin’s autobiography, edited by his granddaughter, with the original omissions restored.

De Beer, Sir Gavin. Charles Darwin: A Scientific Biography. New York: Doubleday, 1965. The standard authorized biography of Darwin by an English scientist who enjoyed full access to the Darwin Papers at Cambridge University.

Eiseley, Loren. Darwin’s Century: Evolution and the Men Who Discovered It. New York: Doubleday, 1958. A rigorous intellectual history of the concept of evolution and its antecedents, from Darwin’s precursors through the publication of On the Origin of Species and its reception.

Hodge, Jonathan, and Gregory Radick, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Darwin. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Collection of essays examining Darwin’s major theories, the development of his thinking, and how his thought has influenced philosophical, religious, and social debate. Includes an essay placing Darwin’s work within the context of Victorian science.

Irvine, William. Apes, Angels, and Victorians: The Story of Darwin, Huxley, and Evolution. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1955. A detailed cultural study of Darwinism and its impact on the Victorian mind.