Charles Darwin

• 1. Introduction

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  Charles Robert Darwin once jotted his thoughts about marriage on two scraps of paper, drawing two columns headed "Marry" and "Not Marry". Under the case for marriage he wrote that a wife would be a "constant companion and a friend in old age... better than a dog anyhow". Against it he listed "less money for books" and "terrible loss of time". This is the same man who would propose that every species of life descended from a common ancestor. He was born on the 12th of February 1809 and died on the 19th of April 1882. He was honoured by burial in Westminster Abbey, close to John Herschel and Isaac Newton. How did a young man who neglected his medical education and preferred riding and shooting to study become one of the most influential figures in human history? What did he see on a five-year sea voyage that made him write that certain facts "undermine the stability of Species"? And why did he later compare confessing his theory to confessing a murder? This is the story of how a reluctant student arrived at the unifying theory of the life sciences.

• 2. A Reluctant Apprentice

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  John Edmonstone taught Darwin taxidermy in around 40 daily hour-long sessions. Edmonstone was a Black Briton from Demerara in the South American rainforest, who had been freed from slavery when brought to Scotland. Darwin long recalled him as "a very pleasant and intelligent man". The lessons came during a medical education Darwin barely tolerated. He had gone to the University of Edinburgh Medical School with his brother Erasmus in October 1825. He found the lectures dull and surgery distressing, so he neglected his studies and helped Robert Edmond Grant investigate marine invertebrates instead. On the 27th of March 1827, Darwin presented his own discovery to the Plinian Society, a student natural-history group. He had found that black spores inside oyster shells were the eggs of a skate leech. One day Grant praised the evolutionary ideas of Lamarck, and Darwin was astonished by the audacity, though he had read similar notions in the journals of his grandfather Erasmus Darwin. His neglect of medicine annoyed his father, the wealthy society doctor Robert Darwin, who sent him to Christ's College, Cambridge in January 1828 to train as an Anglican country parson. At Cambridge he joined the "Glutton Club," which consumed "birds and beasts which were before unknown to human palate." Through his second cousin William Darwin Fox he took up beetle collecting, and through Fox he became a close follower of the botany professor John Stevens Henslow. In his final examination in January 1831 he did well, coming tenth out of 178 candidates for the ordinary degree.

• 3. The Five-Year Voyage

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  A letter from Henslow, waiting at home on the 29th of August 1831, proposed Darwin for a self-funded place aboard a ship with captain Robert FitzRoy. The vessel was to chart the coastline of South America. Robert Darwin objected, calling the voyage a waste of time, but his brother-in-law Josiah Wedgwood the second persuaded him to fund his son's place. HMS Beagle set sail on the 27th of December 1831, and the voyage lasted almost five years. Despite suffering badly from seasickness, Darwin wrote copious notes on board the ship. At their first stop ashore at St Jago in Cape Verde, Darwin noticed a white band of seashells high in the volcanic cliffs. FitzRoy had handed him the first volume of Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology, which described land slowly rising or falling over immense periods. Darwin began to see the world Lyell's way. In cliffs near Punta Alta, Darwin made a significant find of fossil bones of huge extinct mammals lying beside modern seashells. He found bony plates like a giant version of the armour on local armadillos. From a jaw and a tooth he identified the gigantic Megatherium. On the geologically new Galapagos Islands, he found mockingbirds that differed from island to island, and he heard that slight variations in tortoise shells showed which island each came from. In Tierra del Fuego he met three Fuegians who had been seized during the first Beagle voyage and given a Christian education in England. One, named Jemmy Button, later lived like the other natives, had a wife, and had no wish to return to England. Organising his notes as the ship sailed home, Darwin wrote that if his suspicions about the mockingbirds and the tortoises were correct, "such facts undermine the stability of Species", then cautiously added the word "would" before "undermine".

• 4. Wedges In Nature

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  On the 28th of September 1838, Darwin read the sixth edition of Malthus's An Essay on the Principle of Population. He noted its claim that human population, when unchecked, doubles itself every twenty-five years, soon outstripping the food supply. Darwin was already primed to compare this to Augustin de Candolle's "warring of the species" of plants. The insight struck him at once. Because species always breed beyond available resources, favourable variations would help organisms survive and pass those traits to their offspring, while unfavourable ones would be lost. He wrote of "a force like a hundred thousand wedges trying to force into every kind of adapted structure into the gaps in the economy of nature". By mid-December he saw the parallel between a farmer picking the best stock and a Malthusian Nature selecting from chance variants. He called this comparison "a beautiful part of my theory". He later named the process natural selection, by analogy with what he termed the "artificial selection" of selective breeding. To gather evidence he questioned not just expert naturalists but, unconventionally, farmers and pigeon fanciers with practical breeding experience. He had already sketched in his "B" notebook a genealogical branching of a single evolutionary tree, writing that "It is absurd to talk of one animal being higher than another". This discarded Lamarck's idea of separate lineages climbing towards higher forms. Darwin included mankind in his speculations from the start, and on seeing an orangutan at the zoo on the 28th of March 1838 he noted its childlike behaviour.

• 5. Confessing A Murder

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  "It is like confessing a murder." Darwin wrote those words to the botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker on the 11th of January 1844, with melodramatic humour, about his theorising. By July of that year he had expanded a pencil sketch into a 230-page Essay, to be published with his research if he died prematurely. For fifteen years the work stayed in the background while he wrote on geology and the Beagle collections. His barnacle research grew from a single colony collected in Chile in 1835, a creature he nicknamed Mr. Arthrobalanus. Eight years of dissecting barnacles followed. The labour earned him the Royal Society's Royal Medal in 1853 and made his reputation as a biologist, but it exhausted him. At the end he declared, "I hate a barnacle as no man ever did before." Darwin's caution had a private cost. In 1851 his treasured daughter Annie fell ill and died the same year, reawakening his fear that his own illness might be hereditary. His ailments were lifelong. After an "uncomfortable palpitation of the heart" in 1837, doctors urged him to "knock off all work". For the rest of his life he suffered episodes of stomach pains, vomiting, severe boils, and trembling, especially during stress. The cause was never identified, and treatments brought only fleeting relief.

• 6. Forestalled

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  On the 18th of June 1858 a paper arrived from Alfred Russel Wallace, then working in Borneo, describing natural selection. Darwin was shocked that he had been "forestalled", and sent the paper to Lyell that same day. His household was in crisis, with children in the village dying of scarlet fever, so he put matters in the hands of his friends. Lyell and Hooker arranged a joint presentation of both men's work at the Linnean Society on the 1st of July. On the evening of the 28th of June, Darwin's baby son died of scarlet fever, and he was too distraught to attend. There was little immediate attention to the announcement. The president of the Linnean Society remarked the following year that no revolutionary discoveries had marked it. Darwin then struggled for thirteen months to produce an abstract of his big book. Lyell arranged for John Murray to publish it. On the Origin of Species proved unexpectedly popular, and its entire stock of 1,250 copies was oversubscribed when it went on sale to booksellers on the 22nd of November 1859. Darwin called the book "one long argument". He avoided explicit discussion of human origins, but offered one hint, writing that "Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history." The book closed with a famous passage about "endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful" being "evolved". That last word was the only variant of "evolved" in the first five editions.

• 7. Apes And Reservations

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  "How extremely stupid not to have thought of that!" That was Thomas Henry Huxley's reaction on reading the Origin. Huxley had been firmly against the transmutation of species, but became one of Darwin's fiercest champions. The book aroused international interest with less controversy than the earlier best-seller Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. The first review asked, "If a monkey has become a man, what may not a man become?" The most famous confrontation came at the 1860 Oxford evolution debate, during a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. The Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, argued against human descent from apes. Joseph Hooker argued strongly for Darwin, and Huxley's retort, that he would rather be descended from an ape than a man who misused his gifts, came to symbolise a triumph of science over religion. Liberal clergymen found room for the theory. The cleric Charles Kingsley saw natural selection as "just as noble a conception of Deity". Recognition followed slowly. Both Prince Albert and the Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, recommended Darwin for a knighthood without success, opposed by Bishop Wilberforce. Britain's highest scientific honour, the Royal Society's Copley Medal, came on the 3rd of November 1864. That same day Huxley held the first meeting of what became the "X Club", devoted to "science, pure and free, untrammelled by religious dogmas". In America, Othniel C. Marsh unearthed the ancestors of the modern horse, and in an 1877 speech traced the evolution of vertebrates from fish through to humans.

• 8. Orchids And Worms

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  An orchid from Madagascar, Angraecum sesquipedale, had a nectary sixteen inches long. Darwin predicted that a moth must exist with a proboscis long enough to reach the last drop and pollinate it. Explorers discovered such a moth, Xanthopan, in 1903, more than two decades after his death. The prediction came from his 1862 book Fertilisation of Orchids, his first detailed demonstration that natural selection could explain complex ecological relationships. As his health declined he lay on a sickbed in a room filled with experiments to trace the movements of climbing plants. He was the first person to recognise the significance of carnivory in plants. With The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex in 1871, Darwin set out evidence that humans are animals, and used sexual selection to explain features such as the peacock's plumage. He wrote that man "still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin". His 1872 book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals was one of the first to feature printed photographs. Darwin remarked with satisfaction that "everybody is talking about it without being shocked." His final book, in 1881, examined the role of earthworms in forming soil, an idea sparked decades earlier when his uncle Josiah pointed out an area where cinders had disappeared under loam. Darwin died at Down House on the 19th of April 1882, aged 73. His last words told Emma, "I am not the least afraid of death." Thousands attended his funeral on Wednesday the 26th of April, and one of his geographical namesakes, Darwin Harbour, eventually became the location of Darwin, the capital city of Australia's Northern Territory.