Charles Darwin was born on February 12, 1809, in Shrewsbury, England
and died at the Down House in Kent on April 19, 1882. He was born
to Robert and Susannah Darwin. Robert was a successful physician
whose father, Erasmus Darwin, had also been a physician but had
made his name as a poet of the natural world. Susannah Wedgwood
came from a family of potters; her father, Josiah Wedgwood, had
made a small fortune making high-quality pottery. Both sides of
Darwin's family were liberal in their politics and indifferent in
their religion.
Darwin spent his childhood playing at The Mount, the Darwin home
and estate in Shrewsbury. He was schooled at home by his sister
Caroline until he was eight years old and Susannah died. He then
spent a year at a day school and transferred to a boarding school,
the Shrewsbury School, only a mile away from The Mount. There he
studied, getting acceptable but unremarkable grades, until age
sixteen, when his father sent him to the University of Edinburgh to
study medicine. Darwin focused on collecting, hunting, and naturalizing
instead of medicine. It was there that he first learned to study
and collect beetles. The marine biologist Robert Grant took him
under his wing. After two years, it was obvious that Darwin would
not become a doctor, so with the help of his father Darwin transferred
to the University of Cambridge to study for the clergy of the Anglican
Church. There he became friends with the older botanist John Henslow.
Soon after graduating, in 1831, Darwin was offered a position on
board the HMS Beagle, a ship that was mapping the
coast of South America on a two or three year voyage around the
world. He eagerly accepted the opportunity and spent the next five
years on board the Beagle, taking copious notes
and sending thousands of samples and specimens back to Henslow
in England for safe- keeping.
When Darwin returned to England he found that Henslow
and other geologists, zoologists, and botanists were fascinated
by the specimens he had collected. He spent the next ten years
cataloging and describing the discoveries he had made on his journey.
He wrote books on coral reefs and volcanic islands, various papers, and
a journal of his voyage. While working on these, he also started to
think about a deeper, more important problem: the origin of species.
He opened his first notebook on the topic in 1837, more than twenty
years before he would finally be confident enough of his new theory
of "evolution by natural selection" to publish it.
In 1839, Darwin married Emma Wedgwood, his cousin, and they
moved in to a house in London where Darwin could focus on his work.
Unfortunately, his health started to fail mysteriously, so they
moved to the country. They lived in a small village where Darwin
could find peace and quiet. After completing his work on the results
of the Beagle voyage, still not ready to publish
his thoughts on evolution, Darwin turned to what seemed at first
like a small, insignificant problem: the classification of different
kinds of barnacles. Darwin soon became entangled in the enormous
project of dissecting and describing all of the barnacles of the
world for what eventually became a four- volume work. Eight years
later, in 1854, he finally finished, and was able to turn back
to the problem of evolution.
In 1857, Alfred Russell Wallace sent Darwin a paper regarding the
evolution of species. Wallace's theory was very similar to Darwin's.
Wallace's paper and a sketch of Darwin's theory were presented
at the Linnean Society. Darwin decided to produce an "abstract"
of a longer book on evolution that he was working on, so as not
to let anyone else take credit for an idea he had been developing
for more than twenty years. The abstract was published in 1859
as On the Origin of Species, or the Preservation of Favoured Races
in the Struggle for Life. It was an immediate sensation,
selling out the first printing within a day. Debates over the meaning
of the theory for the nature of humanity began, though Darwin himself remained
above the fray in his self-imposed isolation at Down House. His
friends Joseph Hooker, the botanist, and especially Thomas Henry
Huxley, the zoologist, defended his theory to the world while he
continued to do research.
In the 1860s, Darwin worked on three books. One was about variation
under domestication, which he saw as being parallel to variation
in the wild. Another was about the evolution of humanity and the
role of sexual selection. The final one regarded the expression
of emotions. The book on humanity and sexual selection, The Descent
of Man, was published in 1871. Darwin expected it to cause
a sensation with its claims that humans were descended from other
animals, but most of the thunder had been stolen twelve years ago
by the Origin. In 1872, The Expression
of Emotions in Animals and Man was published.
In his last decade, Darwin turned away from evolution
and focused on the garden. His research on climbing plants and
the geological role of earthworms turned his workshop into a virtual greenhouse
and resulted in several books. The illness that had plagued Darwin
throughout his life began to abate somewhat, so that although he
was still not strong, he was able to enjoy his old age. By 1877,
his theories were still controversial, but he was so well respected
that the University of Cambridge gave him an honorary doctorate.
In 1882, he weakened. Darwin died on April 19, 1882, at the Down
House. He was buried in Westminster Abbey.
