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English naturalist, geologist, and biologist
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- Charles Robert Darwin FRS FRGS FLS FZS JP (/ ˈdɑːrwɪn / DAR-win; 12 February 1809 – 19 April 1882) was an English naturalist, geologist, and biologist, widely known for his contributions to evolutionary biology.
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Charles Robert Darwin FRS FRGS FLS FZS JP [5] (/ ˈ d ɑːr w ɪ n / [6] DAR-win; 12 February 1809 – 19 April 1882) was an English naturalist, geologist, and biologist, [7] widely known for his contributions to evolutionary biology.
- Overview
- Early life and education
Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection is the foundation upon which modern evolutionary theory is built. The theory was outlined in Darwin’s seminal work On the Origin of Species, published in 1859. Although Victorian England (and the rest of the world) was slow to embrace natural selection as the mechanism that drives evolution, the concept of evolution itself gained widespread traction by the end of Darwin’s life.
natural selection
Read more about natural selection.
What is evolution, as Charles Darwin understood it?
Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution had three main components: that variation occurred randomly among members of a species; that an individual’s traits could be inherited by its progeny; and that the struggle for existence would allow only those with favorable traits to survive. Although many of his ideas have been borne out by modern science, Darwin didn’t get everything right: traces of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s outdated theory of evolution remained in Darwin’s own. He was also unable to correctly establish how traits were inherited, which wasn’t clarified until the rediscovery of Gregor Mendel’s work with peas.
Read more below: On the Origin of Species
Darwin was the second son of society doctor Robert Waring Darwin and of Susannah Wedgwood, daughter of the Unitarian pottery industrialist Josiah Wedgwood. Darwin’s other grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, a freethinking physician and poet fashionable before the French Revolution, was author of Zoonomia; or the Laws of Organic Life (1794–96). Darwin’s mother died when he was eight, and he was cared for by his three elder sisters. The boy stood in awe of his overbearing father, whose astute medical observations taught him much about human psychology. But he hated the rote learning of Classics at the traditional Anglican Shrewsbury School, where he studied between 1818 and 1825. Science was then considered dehumanizing in English public schools, and for dabbling in chemistry Darwin was condemned by his headmaster (and nicknamed “Gas” by his schoolmates).
His father, considering the 16-year-old a wastrel interested only in game shooting, sent him to study medicine at Edinburgh University in 1825. Later in life, Darwin gave the impression that he had learned little during his two years at Edinburgh. In fact, it was a formative experience. There was no better science education in a British university. He was taught to understand the chemistry of cooling rocks on the primitive Earth and how to classify plants by the modern “natural system.” At the Edinburgh Museum he was taught to stuff birds by John Edmonstone, a freed South American slave, and to identify the rock strata and colonial flora and fauna.
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The Victorian England Quiz: Art, Literature, and Life
More crucially, the university’s radical students exposed the teenager to the latest Continental sciences. Edinburgh attracted English Dissenters who were barred from graduating at the Anglican universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and at student societies Darwin heard freethinkers deny the Divine design of human facial anatomy and argue that animals shared all the human mental faculties. One talk, on the mind as the product of a material brain, was officially censored, for such materialism was considered subversive in the conservative decades after the French Revolution. Darwin was witnessing the social penalties of holding deviant views. As he collected sea slugs and sea pens on nearby shores, he was accompanied by Robert Edmond Grant, a radical evolutionist and disciple of the French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. An expert on sponges, Grant became Darwin’s mentor, teaching him about the growth and relationships of primitive marine invertebrates, which Grant believed held the key to unlocking the mysteries surrounding the origin of more-complex creatures. Darwin, encouraged to tackle the larger questions of life through a study of invertebrate zoology, made his own observations on the larval sea mat (Flustra) and announced his findings at the student societies.
The young Darwin learned much in Edinburgh’s rich intellectual environment, but not medicine: he loathed anatomy, and (pre-chloroform) surgery sickened him. His freethinking father, shrewdly realizing that the church was a better calling for an aimless naturalist, switched him to Christ’s College, Cambridge, in 1828. In a complete change of environment, Darwin was now educated as an Anglican gentleman. He took his horse, indulged his drinking, shooting, and beetle-collecting passions with other squires’ sons, and managed 10th place in the Bachelor of Arts degree in 1831. Here he was shown the conservative side of botany by a young professor, the Reverend John Stevens Henslow, while that doyen of Providential design in the animal world, the Reverend Adam Sedgwick, took Darwin to Wales in 1831 on a geologic field trip.
- Adrian J. Desmond
Feb 11, 2022 · Charles Darwin was a scientist who changed the way we think about everything that lives on our planet - read our guide to find out all about him and what he did
Apr 3, 2014 · Charles Darwin was a British naturalist who developed a theory of evolution based on natural selection. His views, and “social Darwinism,” remain controversial.
Charles Robert Darwin was born in Shrewsbury, Shropshire, the fifth of six children of wealthy and well-connected parents. The young Charles had a quietly Christian upbringing, but his family...
Find out about Charles Darwin’s life, research and theory of evolution with BBC Bitesize KS3 History. For students aged between 11 to 14.
Learn about the life and work of Charles Darwin, the British scientist who revolutionised our understanding of evolution and natural selection. Explore his voyage on HMS Beagle, his experiments with pigeons, his controversial books and his legacy.
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