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| Charles Darwin |
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 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 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.
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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| First Sketch of the theory of evolution 1842 |
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