Charles Darwin
Biography
Charles Darwin (February 12, 1809 – April 19, 1882) was an English naturalist
who gained great fame within his lifetime as well as long after his death for the
development of evolutionary theory. Most of Charles Darwin's evolutionary theory
is contained in the book Origin of Species (1859).
Charles Darwin was born in Shrewsbury, Shropshire England in 1809. He was
the fifth of six children of a wealthy doctor and financier and although his family
was Unitarian he attended the Anglican Shrewsbury School as a boarder in
1818. By 1825 he was an apprentice doctor at the University of Edinburgh
Medical school but he did not like the work involved. In his second year he joined
the Plinian Society, a student natural history group that engaged in discussions
of radical materialism. He assisted Robert Edmund Grant in the research of
marine invertebrates' anatomy and life cycle and in 1827 presented one of his
own findings of black spores to the Plinian Society. Darwin also assisted
collections at the University Museum. Darwin's voracious interest in natural
history angered his father and he was sent to Christ's College at Cambridge in
1828 to study to become a parson but was unqualified to take anything but the
ordinary degree course. At this time he took up beetle collecting under the
influence of his cousin William Duncan Fox and again was noted for his
discoveries and was published in Steven's Illustrations of British Entomology. He
ended up doing rather well in the ordinary courses and graduated tenth in his
class in 1831.
As well as an unhindered appetite for natural history, Darwin was also a rampant
reader and works that he devoured at this time were Paley's Natural Theology,
Alexander von Humboldt's Personal Narrative and work by John Herschel. He
was fresh from studying geology with Adam Sedgewick when his mentor John
Stevens Henslow recommended him to accompany Robert FitzRoy on the HMS
Beagle. On the Beagle, Darwin also read Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology
and was impressed with his findings of geological formations over time. On the
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Charles Darwin
Biography
voyage, Darwin took many notes and gathered specimens, sending letters of
report back to England. By the time he returned his fame was already underway
and he began to work on the variety of specimens he brought back of which
there were so many that there was cause for concern for how well they would
keep before they were able to be studied. In 1837 he was elected to the Council
of the Geological Society and all this time we was feverishly working on writing
and rewriting his journal taken during his voyage and the specimens he procured
were being studied at the Royal College of Surgeons under the supervision of
Richard Owen who Darwin had met through his enthusiastic new friend Lyell.
Darwin's findings at this time began to reveal what would come to be his major
contribution to evolutionary science. Not only did Owen find extinct creatures
such as gigantic ground sloths, a hippopotamus-sized skull resembling a rodent
and armor fragments from a creature not unlike the armadillo, but there was
some consternation over a mixture of bird specimens that Darwin had brought
back and were being studied by ornithologist, John Gould. Not only did Gould
find that Darwin's initial impression that he collected a mixture of finches and
blackbirds prove to be false, but that the birds were in fact twelve completely
separate species of finches. Darwin went back over his notes and realized in
conjunction with Gould that the twelve species could be allocated to different
islands and that there was a geographical influence on perhaps just one species
that augured the separation of development into twelve different species. It was
at this point that Darwin began to develop his ideas on the transmutation of
species that was not hierarchical in nature, but was reliant on species "to adapt
and alter the race to changing world." This went against Lamarck's claim that
lineages would progress to higher forms and of this Darwin said that "it is absurd
to talk of one animal being higher than another."
It was also in 1838 that he decided after deliberation (which is found in his
notebooks in a pro/con type list) to marry his cousin Emma Wedgewood. She
was strong in her Unitarian beliefs and was concerned that Darwin's developing
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Charles Darwin
Biography
doubts about spirituality and religion would separate them in the afterlife,
however, on the whole, she accepted their differences. For the next fifteen years
into their married life, Darwin would continue to work on his large theory, but in
the meantime was taken up with writing about geology. He even enjoyed a return
to marine invertebrates in 1846 after his third geological book was published,
going over the barnacles that he had collected while on the Beagle. He continued
to have issues with his health and in 1849 found that hydrotherapy was
somewhat successful in easing his pains, but in 1851 he was much distressed to
lose his daughter Annie.
The work on barnacles earned Darwin the Royal Society's Royal medal in 1853
as he was able to find "homologies" that extrapolated on some of his view that
began to be stirred with the finches. Here he saw that body parts of the barnacles
varied depending on the environment that surrounded them and that by evolution
the creatures were able to adapt to their environment. He also located an
intermediate stage in the evolution of sexes when he found in genera, tiny male
specimens parasitic on hermaphrodites. this work cemented his stature as
eminent biologist and he resumed his work on a theory of species in 1854.
Darwin had yet to feel the pressure to publish the extent of his thoughts on
evolutionary science within species, however. Lyell pointed out to him the
similarities of what he was proposing in 1856 in Alfred Russel Wallace's paper on
species and Darwin began a short paper to explicate his own ideas. It wasn't until
1858, however when it appeared that Wallace was very close to publishing a
treatise on natural selection that Darwin struggled through his own illnesses and
the death of a baby son to scarlet fever to get On the Origin of Species out by the
end of 1859. All through this time it is important to note that Wallace and himself
were friends with Wallace looking up to Darwin. They were to present jointly at
the Linnean Society On the Tendency of Species to form Varieties; and on the
Perpetuation of Varieties and Species by Natural Means of Selection, but this
occurred at the time that Darwin experienced the loss of his son.
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Charles Darwin
Biography
On the Origin of Species was wildly popular and heavily debated from the
moment of its release in 1859. Darwin was careful to speak of common descent
and not evolution, but controversy ensued all the same. Darwin continued to
work and published even more after the success of his great tome broaching
heredity, the animality of humans as well as psychology. He died in 1882 at
Down House his last words being to his dear wife Emma, "I am not the least
afraid of death - Remember what a good wife you have been to me - Tell all my
children to remember how good they have been to me." Darwin had expected to
be buried in the nearby st Mary's churchyard at Downe, but his colleagues had
something rather different in mind. the president of the Royal Society, William
Spottiswoode, arranged a state funeral for Darwin and he is buried in
Westminster Abbey, perceived a national hero.
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