Charles Darwin

Charles Robert Darwin was an English naturalist, geologist, and biologist. He is widely known for his work in evolutionary biology. He proposed that all species came from a common ancestor. Today, this idea is accepted by scientists as a basic part of science. Working together with Alfred Russel Wallace, he described a process he called natural selection. In this process, the struggle for existence works in a way similar to the careful choosing of plants and animals in selective breeding. Darwin is often described as one of the most influential people in human history. He was honoured with burial in Westminster Abbey.

Darwin's early interest in nature led him away from his medical studies at the University of Edinburgh. Instead, he helped Robert Edmond Grant study marine invertebrates. From 1828 to 1831, he studied at Christ's College of the University of Cambridge. This time helped grow his love of natural science. His five-year voyage on HMS Beagle, from 1831 to 1836, made him well known as a geologist. The things he observed supported Charles Lyell's concept of gradual geological change. His travel journal, The Voyage of the Beagle (1839), made him a popular writer. His first scientific book was The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs (1842). Along with his work on barnacles, it won him the Royal Medal in 1853.

Darwin was curious about where plants, animals, and fossils were found around the world. He studied this carefully. In 1838, he came up with his theory of natural selection. In 1858, he was writing about his theory when Wallace sent him an essay with the same idea. Because of this, they both shared their theories with the Linnean Society of London at the same time. Darwin shared his theory with strong evidence in On the Origin of Species (1859). Later, he wrote about coevolution in Fertilisation of Orchids (1862). He also wrote about human evolution and sexual selection in The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871). The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) was an early work about psychology and one of the first books with photographs. His last book was The Formation of Vegetable Mould, through the Actions of Worms (1881).

By the 1870s, most scientists and many educated people accepted evolution as a fact. However, many people first preferred competing explanations that gave natural selection only a small role. Later, from the 1930s to the 1950s, during the modern evolutionary synthesis, scientists broadly agreed that natural selection was the main way evolution works. Darwin's discovery is now a unifying theory of the life sciences. It helps explain the unity and diversity of life.

Biography

Further information: Second voyage of HMS Beagle

Further information: Inception of Darwin's theory

Further information: Health of Charles Darwin

Further information: Development of Darwin's theory

Further information: Publication of Darwin's theory

Further information: Reactions to On the Origin of Species

Further information: Orchids to Variation, Descent of Man to Emotions, and Insectivorous Plants to Worms

See also: Darwin from Insectivorous Plants to Worms § Death

Charles Robert Darwin was born on 12 February 1809 in his family's home in Shrewsbury, England. He studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh and later at Christ's College, Cambridge. He became very interested in nature and collecting plants and animals. After Cambridge, he joined a survey voyage on HMS Beagle, led by captain Robert FitzRoy. The voyage lasted almost five years. Darwin collected many fossils, plants, and animals, and he wrote careful notes about what he saw. When he returned to England, he studied his collections and began to think about how species change over time.

Darwin's health was often poor, but he kept working. He wrote books about geology and spent many years studying barnacles. In 1859 he published On the Origin of Species, which explained his idea of natural selection. His theory proposed that all species have descended from a common ancestor. He later wrote The Descent of Man and studied plants, including orchids and insect-eating plants. Darwin died at Down House on 19 April 1882, at the age of 73. He was buried in Westminster Abbey, near John Herschel and Isaac Newton.

Children

Further information: Darwin–Wedgwood family § Charles Darwin

The Darwins had ten children. Two died as babies. The death of Annie at age ten was very painful for her parents. Charles was a loving and caring father. When his children became sick, he worried they might have inherited weaknesses from inbreeding, because he and his wife and cousin, Emma Wedgwood, were close relatives. He wrote about inbreeding and compared it with the benefits of outcrossing in many living things.

Charles Waring Darwin, born in December 1856, was the tenth and last child. Emma was 48 when he was born. He had severe learning difficulties and never learned to walk or talk. He probably had Down syndrome, which doctors had not yet described at that time. Charles Waring died of scarlet fever on 28 June 1858. Darwin wrote in his journal, "Poor dear Baby died." Three of his surviving children, George, Francis and Horace, became Fellows of the Royal Society. They were known as an astronomer, a botanist and a civil engineer, and all three were knighted. Another son, Leonard, became a soldier, politician, economist, eugenicist, and mentor of the statistician and evolutionary biologist Ronald Fisher.

Views and opinions

Further information: Religious views of Charles Darwin

Darwin came from a family with nonconformist Unitarianism traditions. His father and grandfather were freethinkers. As a young man, he trained to become an Anglican clergyman, and he believed every word of the Bible was completely true. He learned science from John Herschel and from William Paley's natural theology. This idea looked for explanations in the laws of nature and saw how well living things fit their surroundings as a sign of design. On the Beagle voyage, he was still quite orthodox and quoted the Bible on morality. He even suggested that the very similar antlions in Australia and England were evidence of a divine hand. Later, he took a critical view of the Bible's historical accuracy and wondered why one religion should be seen as more correct than another.

Darwin was troubled by the problem of evil. For example, the ichneumon wasp lays its eggs on caterpillars, and he could not see an all-powerful God in such suffering. Paley and Thomas Malthus saw hardship as part of a kind creator's laws. Darwin believed that natural selection could explain why living things are so well suited to their homes, without needing a designer. He saw religion as a tribal survival strategy, yet he was reluctant to give up the idea of God as an ultimate lawgiver. He stayed close friends with the vicar of Downe, John Brodie Innes. Later, he wrote that "agnostic" best described his state of mind. At other times, he believed in a First Cause. The "Lady Hope Story", published in 1915, claimed he returned to Christianity on his sickbed. However, his children rejected this, and historians have dismissed it as false.

Darwin grew up in a family of Whig reformers who supported electoral reform and the freeing of enslaved people. He was strongly opposed to slavery. In 1826, he took taxidermy lessons from the freed slave John Edmonstone, whom he later remembered as "a very pleasant and intelligent man." This helped strengthen his belief that Black people had the same feelings and could be as intelligent as people of other races. He held the same attitude toward the native people he met on the Beagle voyage. Silliman and Bachman noticed how this was different from slave-owning America. Darwin remained strongly against slavery, against ranking the so-called races of humans as separate species, and against unfair treatment of native people.

His views on the Yaghans he met in Tierra del Fuego changed over time. At first, he described the Fuegian people in unkind terms. As he came to know them better, he concluded that basic emotions were the same across human groups and that their mental abilities were roughly equal to those of Europeans. Darwin believed that men became more prominent than women through a special kind of selection. This idea was challenged by Antoinette Brown Blackwell in her 1875 book The Sexes Throughout Nature.

Darwin was also interested in the ideas of his half-cousin Francis Galton. Galton used statistical analysis of heredity to argue that human traits could be inherited. Darwin thought a plan to encourage certain people to marry was "utopian." He preferred to highlight the importance of inheritance and leave decisions to individuals. Galton named this field "eugenics" in 1883, after Darwin's death. His theories were later used to promote eugenic policies.

Evolutionary social movements

Further information: Eugenics, Social effects of evolutionary theory, and Degeneration theory

Darwin was so famous that people often linked his name to ideas that were only loosely related to his work. Sometimes these ideas even went against what he believed. In the 1830s, Thomas Malthus's ideas were used to support workhouses and laissez-faire economics. Some critics said Darwin's "struggle for existence" fit the business practices of England at that time. Others used natural selection to support different and often opposing ideas, such as colonialism and imperialism. Darwin himself did not think that society should simply copy the struggle and selection found in nature. Groups such as pacifists, socialists, and Peter Kropotkin put more focus on working together.

After the 1880s, the eugenics movement grew out of ideas about how traits are passed down. It sometimes used Darwin's ideas to support its views. Negative eugenics, which wanted to remove people it called "feebleminded," was popular in several countries, including the United States, Canada, and Australia. Later, Nazi eugenics made the whole field look very bad. The term "Social Darwinism" was rarely used starting in the 1890s. In the 1940s, it became a popular insult when Richard Hofstadter used it to criticise people like William Graham Sumner. Since then, people who object to what they see as the moral effects of evolution have often used the term.

Works

Darwin wrote many books. Even without his work on evolution, he would be well known for The Voyage of the Beagle. He was also a geologist who wrote widely about South America. He solved the puzzle of how coral atolls formed. As a biologist, he wrote the most complete work on barnacles.

Many people know him best for On the Origin of Species. His other books, such as The Descent of Man and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, also had a big impact. His books about plants, including The Power of Movement in Plants, were new and very important. His last book, The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms, was important too.

Legacy and commemoration

Further information: List of things named after Charles Darwin, List of taxa described by Charles Darwin, and Commemoration of Charles Darwin

Alfred Russel Wallace said that Darwin changed how people think more than almost anyone of his time, and perhaps more than anyone ever. The paleoanthropologist Trenton Holliday said Darwin is rightly seen as the greatest evolutionary scientist of all time. Ernst Mayr said that On the Origin of Species had the second-greatest influence on human thought, after the Bible. He also said that the scientific revolution started by Darwin's theory of evolution was perhaps the most important change in the history of human ideas.

By about 1880, most scientists believed that living things had changed over time from common ancestors. However, few agreed with Darwin that natural selection was the main way this happened. During the eclipse of Darwinism, scientists looked at other explanations. Later, Ronald Fisher combined Mendelian genetics with Darwin's ideas in The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection. This led to population genetics and the modern evolutionary synthesis, which is still developing. New scientific discoveries have supported Darwin's main ideas. The biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky said, "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution."

Many places and living things carry Darwin's name. Darwin Sound and Mount Darwin were named during the Beagle voyage. Darwin Harbour was named by his former shipmates on its next voyage. That harbour became the site of Darwin, the capital of the Northern Territory in Australia. Many plants and animals were given Darwin's name, some officially and some informally, including many he had collected on the voyage.

The Darwin–Wallace Medal was first given in 1908 to mark fifty years since Darwin and Wallace shared their theory. Darwin College at Cambridge University, founded in 1964, is named after the Darwin family. From 2000 to 2017, UK£10 banknotes from the Bank of England showed Darwin's portrait, along with a hummingbird and HMS Beagle. The Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History has a bronze statue of Darwin sitting with a notebook that contains his "tree of life" sketch.