Free to follow every thread. No paywall, no dead ends.
Charles Darwin: the story on HearLore | HearLore
Charles Darwin
Charles Robert Darwin was born on the 12th of February 1809 at his family's home, The Mount, in Shrewsbury, Shropshire, into a lineage of prominent abolitionists and thinkers. His grandfather Erasmus Darwin had already written poetic fantasies about evolution in Zoonomia, and his other grandfather Josiah Wedgwood was a famous potter and activist. Yet the young Charles found the medical lectures at the University of Edinburgh to be utterly dull and the surgical procedures so distressing that he abandoned his medical studies entirely. Instead of becoming a doctor, he spent his time learning taxidermy from John Edmonstone, a Black Briton who had been freed from slavery in Demerara and taught by Charles Waterton. This unusual mentorship exposed Darwin to radical democratic views and materialistic challenges to orthodox religious concepts, planting early seeds of doubt about the fixed nature of species. He joined the Plinian Society, a student group where lively debates challenged the idea that species were immutable, and he assisted Robert Edmond Grant in investigating the anatomy of marine invertebrates. By the 27th of March 1827, he had presented his own discovery that black spores found in oyster shells were actually the eggs of a skate leech, marking his first foray into scientific publication.
The Voyage That Changed Everything
The five-year voyage on HMS Beagle, which began on the 27th of December 1831, transformed Darwin from a bored undergraduate into an eminent geologist and naturalist. Captain Robert FitzRoy had intended for Darwin to be a gentleman companion rather than a mere collector, but the young naturalist spent most of his time on land investigating geology and making natural history collections. He suffered badly from seasickness yet wrote copious notes, including a journal that would later make him famous as a popular author. In Cape Verde, he found a white band high in volcanic rock cliffs that included seashells, leading him to theorize that the land was slowly rising over immense periods, a concept he learned from Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology. In Patagonia, he discovered fossil bones of huge extinct mammals like the Megatherium beside modern seashells, indicating recent extinction without signs of climate change. He saw stepped plains of shingle and seashells as raised beaches at various elevations, and in Tierra del Fuego, he met Fuegians who had been civilized in England only to return to what he initially called a state of savagery. This encounter challenged his belief in a gap between humans and animals, leading him to think that all humans were interrelated with a shared origin. The voyage ended on the 2nd of October 1836 when the Beagle anchored at Falmouth, Cornwall, leaving Darwin with a lifetime of observations that would eventually undermine the stability of species.
Common questions
When was Charles Darwin born and where did he grow up?
Charles Robert Darwin was born on the 12th of February 1809 at The Mount, his family's home in Shrewsbury, Shropshire. He grew up in a lineage of prominent abolitionists and thinkers including his grandfather Erasmus Darwin and Josiah Wedgwood.
What happened during Charles Darwin's voyage on the HMS Beagle?
The five-year voyage on the HMS Beagle began on the 27th of December 1831 and ended on the 2nd of October 1836 when the ship anchored at Falmouth, Cornwall. During this time Charles Darwin investigated geology and natural history while suffering from seasickness and developing theories about species change and human origins.
How did Charles Darwin develop the theory of natural selection?
Charles Darwin began developing his theory of natural selection in secret starting in mid-July 1837 when he wrote his B notebook. He realized that natural selection was analogous to artificial selection used by farmers and published his ideas in On the Origin of Species on the 22nd of November 1859.
What major books did Charles Darwin publish about human evolution?
Charles Darwin published The Descent of Man in 1871 to show that humans are animals with continuity of physical and mental attributes. He followed this with The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals in 1872 which discussed the evolution of human psychology and its continuity with animal behavior.
When did Charles Darwin die and where was he buried?
Charles Darwin died on the 19th of April 1882 at the age of 73 after suffering from angina pectoris. He was buried in Westminster Abbey on the 26th of April following a public and parliamentary petition that honored him close to John Herschel and Isaac Newton.
Back in England, Darwin began to develop his theory of natural selection in secret, fearing the backlash from the scientific establishment and the church. He started his B notebook in mid-July 1837, and on page 36, he wrote I think above his first evolutionary tree, sketching a branching descent that discarded the idea of independent lineages progressing to higher forms. He realized that one species could change into another to explain the geographical distribution of living species like the rheas and extinct ones like the Macrauchenia. By mid-December, he saw a similarity between farmers picking the best stock in selective breeding and a Malthusian Nature selecting from chance variants. He later called this process natural selection, an analogy with what he termed the artificial selection of selective breeding. The strain of this intensive study took a toll on his health, and by June 1838, he was laid up for days with stomach problems, headaches, and heart symptoms. Despite his illness, he married his cousin Emma Wedgwood on the 29th of January 1839, and they went on to have ten children, seven of whom survived to adulthood. The marriage was a source of great personal joy but also a source of anxiety, as he feared that his chronic illness might be hereditary and that his close family ties with Emma might lead to inbreeding.
The Barnacle Obsession
For fifteen years, Darwin's research into natural selection was in the background to his main occupation of writing on geology and publishing expert reports on the Beagle collections, particularly the barnacles. The impetus of his barnacle research came from a collection of a barnacle colony from Chile in 1835, which he dubbed Mr. Arthrobalanus. His confusion over the relationship of this species to other barnacles caused him to fixate on the systematics of the taxa, and he wrote his first examination of the species in 1846, but did not formally describe it until 1854. He enjoyed observing their beauty and thought about comparisons with allied structures, finding homologies that showed slightly changed body parts served different functions to meet new conditions. In some genera, he found minute males parasitic on hermaphrodites, showing an intermediate stage in the evolution of distinct sexes. This work earned him the Royal Medal in 1853 and made his reputation as a biologist, yet he declared I hate a barnacle as no man ever did before. The barnacle research provided him with the evidence he needed to refine his theory, but it also delayed the publication of his ideas on natural selection, as he felt he needed to be absolutely certain before presenting them to the world.
The Race Against Time
In 1858, Darwin was writing up his theory when Alfred Russel Wallace sent him an essay that described the same idea of natural selection. Shocked that he had been forestalled, Darwin sent the paper to Charles Lyell and Joseph Hooker, who decided on a joint presentation at the Linnean Society on the 1st of July. The presentation included excerpts from Darwin's unpublished notes and Wallace's essay, establishing precedence for both men. The immediate aftermath was little attention, with the president of the Linnean Society remarking that the year had not been marked by any revolutionary discoveries. Darwin struggled for thirteen months to produce an abstract of his big book, suffering from ill health but getting constant encouragement from his scientific friends. On the 22nd of November 1859, On the Origin of Species went on sale, and the entire stock of 1,250 copies was oversubscribed. The book set out one long argument of detailed observations, inferences, and consideration of anticipated objections, including evidence of homologies between humans and other mammals. He avoided explicit discussion of human origins but hinted at the significance of his work with the sentence Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history. The book aroused international interest, with less controversy than had greeted the popular and less scientific Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, and it became a key fixture of popular culture.
The Descent of Man and the Emotions
Darwin continued to press on with his research, covering human descent from earlier animals, including the evolution of society and of mental abilities, as well as explaining decorative beauty in wildlife. In 1871, he published The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, which set out evidence from numerous sources that humans are animals, showing continuity of physical and mental attributes. He presented sexual selection to explain impractical animal features such as the peacock's plumage as well as human evolution of culture, differences between sexes, and physical and cultural racial classification. His research using images was expanded in his 1872 book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, one of the first books to feature printed photographs, which discussed the evolution of human psychology and its continuity with the behavior of animals. Both books proved very popular, and Darwin was impressed by the general assent with which his views had been received, remarking that everybody is talking about it without being shocked. He concluded that man with all his noble qualities still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin, emphasizing that humans are all one species.
The Final Years and Legacy
Despite repeated bouts of illness during the last twenty-two years of his life, Darwin's work continued until his death on the 19th of April 1882, aged 73. He was diagnosed with what was called angina pectoris, which then meant coronary thrombosis and disease of the heart, and his last words were to his family, telling Emma I am not the least afraid of death. He had expected to be buried in St Mary's churchyard at Downe, but at the request of his colleagues, after public and parliamentary petitioning, he was honored by burial in Westminster Abbey, close to John Herschel and Isaac Newton. The funeral, held on the 26th of April, was attended by thousands of people, including family, friends, scientists, philosophers, and dignitaries. His final book, The Formation of Vegetable Mould, through the Actions of Worms, was published in 1881, and by the 1870s, the scientific community and a majority of the educated public had accepted evolution as a fact. It was not until the emergence of the modern evolutionary synthesis from the 1930s to the 1950s that a broad consensus developed in which natural selection was the basic mechanism of evolution. Darwin's discovery remains the unifying theory of the life sciences, explaining the unity and diversity of life, and his influence on human history is immeasurable.