Darwin’s Life
Charles Robert Darwin was born on February 12, 1809 in
Shrewsbury, England. His parents, Robert Darwin and Susannah (Wedgewood)
Darwin, were part of a group of well-known and wealthy society families.
His father was a doctor, and his mother’s family was famous for
its pottery business. In 1817, Darwin’s mother
died. The next year, he began attending the Shrewsbury School as
a boarding student. In 1825, he entered Edinburgh
University to pursue a career in medicine, but he soon turned to
the study of natural history. In 1827, he
left Edinburgh for Christ College at Cambridge University, where
he pursued a degree in theology. J. S. Henslow, a theologian and
professor of botany, became one of Darwin’s close mentors. At Cambridge,
Darwin also became familiar with the work of natural theologian
William Paley. Paley’s influential book Natural Theology argues
that observation of the natural world will lead to the conclusion
that God is the “designer” of life.
After graduating from Cambridge in 1831,
Darwin embarked on a five-year journey that would shape his career
in natural history, and change his life. On Henslow’s recommendation,
Captain Robert Fitzroy employed Darwin to accompany him on an expedition
to South America and Africa. The trip provided Darwin with a unique opportunity
to advance his career as a naturalist. Although Darwin suffered
from seasickness and discomfort through much of the voyage on the
H.M.S. Beagle, he was able to collect data and
specimens that influenced his thinking on evolution and would later
provide evidence for his evolutionary theory. It was also on this
voyage that Darwin read Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology,
which turned out to be an important influence on his thoughts about
geological change. The letters Darwin wrote and sent during the
voyage were read before scientific societies and bolstered Darwin’s
reputation in the scientific community. Upon returning to England
in 1836, Darwin published Journal
of Researches (1839), an account
of his voyage.
In London, Darwin quickly became an eminent figure in
the fields of natural history and botany. In 1837,
his health declined, possibly as a result of a tropical disease
he contracted in South America. In order to recuperate, he left
London for the countryside, where he became acquainted with his
cousin, Emma Wedgewood. Darwin made a list of the pros and cons
of marriage, one of the pros being that a wife was “better than
a dog”; after much consideration, he married Emma in 1839.
They first settled in London before moving to the village of Down
in Kent in 1842. They would have ten children,
although three would die young and others would suffer from illnesses
and aliments.
In Down, Darwin began preparing to publish his theory
of natural selection. In 1844, he drafted
a short essay about his theory. In 1847,
he sent the essay to botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker for feedback.
He also continued his work in other areas of natural science. His
comprehensive study of barnacles, for example, won acclaim from
biologists. However, Darwin’s health problems slowed his scientific
research.
In 1858, while Darwin was working
on the manuscript for The Origin of Species, he
received an abstract of a theory of evolution from naturalist Alfred
Russel Wallace, whose ideas sounded strikingly similar to Darwin’s.
Darwin offered Wallace help in publishing the manuscript, but Hooker
and Lyell, to whom Darwin had forwarded Wallace’s work, urged Darwin
to finish his manuscript quickly so he could publish first. Some
critics argue that Darwin stole ideas from Wallace. But because
Darwin shared his research with Lyell and Hooker prior to receiving
Wallace’s manuscript, and because Wallace’s theory was, in many
ways, different from Darwin’s, the consensus is that Darwin did
not plagiarize. Darwin rushed to finish the manuscript, and On
the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection was
published in 1859 (the title was shortened
to The Origin of Species by Natural Selection after
the first edition and today is commonly referred to as The
Origin of Species).
Darwin’s theory received enormous public attention and
generated both praise and controversy in the scientific realm and
in the general public. The manuscript sold well and went through
six editions in Darwin’s lifetime. Darwin devoted the rest of his
career to publishing works further expounding his theory of evolution,
such as The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication (1868)
and The Descent of Man (1871),
which discusses humans in terms of evolutionary theory. Darwin died
on April 19, 1882.
In recognition of his contributions to science, he was given a state funeral
and buried in Westminster Abbey.
Historical/Scientific Context
Although Charles Darwin is widely considered the founder
of evolutionary theory, he was not the first person to propose that
species evolved from one another. The theory that current life derived
from previous life has existed in some form or another since ancient Greek
times. Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, presented one of the
first formal theories of evolution in his text Zoonomia (1794–1796).
Some have argued that Darwin’s grandfather’s work inspired Darwin’s.
However, it is widely agreed that Darwin’s theory was far more sophisticated
than that of his grandfather, or of other evolutionary theorists.
Darwin’s evolutionary theory is representative of the
eighteenth-century Enlightenment movement in Europe, which preached
the superiority of empirical knowledge, rationality, and science
over theological and religious reasoning. Enlightenment philosophy spurred
a growth in scientific research in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, particularly in the biological and natural sciences. Classification
of natural species became a primary task of naturalists. In Systema
Naturae (1735), Carolus Linneaus
outlined the modern system of species classification. Geologists
also began studying the history of the earth’s surface. Charles
Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1830–1833)
argues that the earth operated on a “steady-state” system, maintaining
its equilibrium through cyclical change as new matter replaces old
matter. Lyell’s work was highly influential to Darwin, opening him
to the idea that the natural world undergoes constant change over
time. Groundbreaking work in mathematics and statistical knowledge
at the time also had important applications for scientific inquiry
into the natural world. Thomas Malthus’s Essay on the Principle
of Population (1797) argued that
exponential population growth would outpace the growth of food and
resources, providing the basis for Darwin’s notions about the “struggle
for existence.”
This growth of scientific research and reasoning inspired
a number of naturalists to think about the origin of species. Prior
to Darwin, several naturalists published theories of evolution.
Darwin’s grandfather was one such naturalist. More famously, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck
proposed a comprehensive theory of what he called transmutation
in Philosophie Zoologique (1809).
Lamarck argued that species evolved by creating their own adaptations
to their environment and that these adaptations were inherited by
their offspring. Lamarck theorized, for example, that the ancestors
of giraffes stretched to reach food high in the trees, gradually
elongating their necks over the course of generations. Later, Robert
Chambers anonymously published Vestiges of Creation (1844),
which conceived of the evolution of species as a linear progression
from one to the next, but was vague about the mechanism that drove
the evolution of species.
Most evolutionary theories came in for criticism from
the scientific community. The fossil record failed to show evidence
charting the evolution of current species from extinct forms. Biologists
also lacked an understanding of the mechanisms of heredity—how, exactly,
characteristics were passed from parents to offspring. It was unclear
if or how “acquired characteristics” (such as giraffes’ stretched
necks) were passed on to offspring. It was also unclear how variations
occurred in species in the first place. Without a reasonable theory
about a mechanism for variation, all proposed theories about mechanisms
for species change (including Darwin’s natural selection) remained
in doubt.
Besides these scientific criticisms, theology was a formidable obstacle
to evolutionary theory. On its face, the idea that species evolved
contradicted the biblical notion that God created species. Rather
than challenging this biblical tradition, many naturalists attempted
to reconcile their ideas with religious belief by suggesting that
the natural world develops according to the intelligent design of a
creator. William Paley attempted such a reconciliation in his famous
work Natural Theology (1802).
Evolutionary theory was also criticized for its materialist and
haphazard worldview, according to which life develops and changes
in reaction to random events, rather than in accordance with a divine
plan. Darwin in particular was criticized for including humans in
his theory of evolution, an inclusion that theologians argued ignored
the intelligence and morality that separated humans from animals.
These criticisms prevented Darwin’s theory from gaining
acceptance in the scientific community for many years. Interestingly, social
theorists began applying Darwin’s theory to human society long before
it gained scientific acceptance. Philosopher Herbert Spencer coined
the term “survival of the fittest” in 1864 based
on Darwin’s theory of natural selection, and Social Darwinists such
as Spencer argued for laissez-faire government policies that would allow
the dominant in society to prosper and the weak to die out, just
as strong and weak species did in natural selection. Francis Galton,
Darwin’s cousin, appropriated Darwin’s emphasis on heredity to promote
the theory of eugenics, which proposed that the top members of society
should birth more offspring, and the bottom members of society should
be restricted in their reproduction, to ensure the evolution of
a better human society. Eugenic theories have links to forced sterilization
campaigns in the United States and the atrocities of Nazi Germany;
while eugenic theorists may have found inspiration in Darwin, it
is important to note that many of these theorists strayed far from
his theories in their arguments.
In the twentieth century, the discovery of Mendelian genetics
and genetic mutation provided the scientific basis for a resurgence
of interest in Darwin’s theory in the scientific world. In 1900,
biologists rediscovered Gregor Mendel’s 1860s
experiments on pea pods, which provided the scientific basis for
heredity missing from Darwin’s theory. Moreover, the discovery of
genetic mutation by Hugo de Vries in 1903 and
furthered by Thomas Hunt Morgan in 1915 explicated
the mechanism for variation that could drive natural selection:
Mutated genes could introduce new characteristics into populations
that would then be passed on to offspring through heredity, providing
a means for new species to be formed from old ones. Theodosious
Dobzhansky synthesized these findings in genetics with natural selection
in Genetics and the Origin of Species (1937),
solidifying the validity of Darwin’s theory in the context of these
new scientific understandings. Darwinism emerged as the leading
explanation for evolution. Despite the objections of certain religious
groups, Darwinism remains the scientifically accepted theory of
the origin of species today.
