Charles Darwin

Charles Darwin
Darwin, circa 1854, when he was preparing On the Origin of Species
Charles Darwin
Born	Charles Robert Darwin 12 2, 1809
Birthplace	Shrewsbury, Shropshire, England
Died	Template:Death date and age Down House, Downe, Kent, England
Nationality	British
Occupation	Naturalist, geologist, biologist
Known for	Theory of evolution by natural selection, On the Origin of Species
Education	University of Cambridge (BA, 1831)
Spouse(s)	Emma Wedgwood (m. 1839)
Children	10
Awards	Royal Medal (1853), Wollaston Medal (1859), Copley Medal (1864)
Website	[http://darwin-online.org.uk/ Official site]

Charles Robert Darwin (12 February 1809 – 19 April 1882) was an English naturalist, geologist, and biologist whose theory of evolution by natural selection fundamentally transformed the biological sciences and reshaped humanity's understanding of its place in the natural world. Born into a prosperous and intellectually distinguished family in Shrewsbury, Shropshire, Darwin showed an early fascination with the natural world that would eventually lead him on a five-year voyage aboard HMS Beagle, a journey that provided the empirical foundation for his life's work. His 1859 book On the Origin of Species argued that all species of life descended from common ancestors through a branching pattern of evolution driven by natural selection — the principle that organisms better adapted to their environment tend to survive and produce more offspring. Darwin presented this theory jointly with Alfred Russel Wallace before the Linnean Society of London in 1858, and spent the remainder of his career amassing evidence in its support through works on orchid fertilisation, human evolution, and the expression of emotions. By the time of his death in 1882, the scientific community and the educated public had largely accepted evolution as fact, and Darwin was honoured with burial in Westminster Abbey.

Early Life

Charles Robert Darwin was born on 12 February 1809 at The Mount, the family home in Shrewsbury, Shropshire, England. He was the fifth of six children born to Robert Waring Darwin, a wealthy society doctor and financier, and Susannah Darwin (née Wedgwood), daughter of the pottery magnate Josiah Wedgwood. His paternal grandfather was Erasmus Darwin, a physician, natural philosopher, and poet who had himself speculated on the transmutation of species in his work Zoonomia. Darwin's mother died when he was eight years old, and he was raised largely by his older sisters.

From an early age, Darwin displayed a keen interest in the natural world. He collected minerals, insects, and shells, and spent considerable time outdoors exploring the countryside around Shrewsbury. In 1818, he entered Shrewsbury School, a nearby Anglican boarding school, where the curriculum was dominated by classics. Darwin later recalled that his education there did him little good, as his mind was absorbed by his collecting hobbies and by chemical experiments he conducted with his older brother Erasmus Alvey Darwin in a garden shed, which earned him the nickname "Gas" from schoolmates.

In 1825, at the age of sixteen, Darwin was sent to the University of Edinburgh to study medicine, following in the footsteps of his father and grandfather. He found the lectures dull and the surgical demonstrations distressing — particularly operations performed without anaesthesia, which was not yet in use. During his second year at Edinburgh, he neglected his medical studies but found intellectual stimulation elsewhere, joining the Plinian Society, a student natural history group, and assisting the zoologist Robert Edmond Grant in investigations of marine invertebrates in the Firth of Forth. Grant was an advocate of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck's ideas on transmutation, and his enthusiasm for invertebrate zoology made a lasting impression on the young Darwin.

Education

Disappointed by his son's lack of progress in medicine, Robert Darwin sent Charles to Christ's College, Cambridge, in 1828 to study for a Bachelor of Arts degree with a view to becoming an Anglican clergyman. At Cambridge, Darwin's interest in natural science deepened considerably. He became a devoted student of the botanist John Stevens Henslow, attending his lectures, accompanying him on field excursions, and becoming known among the faculty as "the man who walks with Henslow." He also read Alexander von Humboldt's Personal Narrative and John Herschel's Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy, works that fired his ambition to contribute to scientific discovery.

Darwin graduated from Cambridge in 1831 with a Bachelor of Arts degree. Although he ranked tenth on the list of non-honours candidates, his time at the university proved crucial. It was Henslow who recommended Darwin for the position of gentleman naturalist aboard HMS Beagle, an opportunity that would shape the entire trajectory of his career and of modern biology.

Career

Voyage of HMS Beagle (1831–1836)

On 27 December 1831, HMS Beagle set sail from Plymouth on what was intended as a two-year surveying expedition but became a five-year circumnavigation of the globe. Darwin served as companion to the ship's captain, Robert FitzRoy, and as the voyage's naturalist. Over the course of the journey, he collected geological, botanical, and zoological specimens across South America, the Galápagos Islands, Tahiti, New Zealand, Australia, and southern Africa.

In South America, Darwin made extensive geological observations. He experienced a major earthquake in Chile, observed the elevation of the Andes, and found marine fossil beds at high altitude, all of which supported Charles Lyell's theories of gradual geological change as outlined in Principles of Geology, a copy of which FitzRoy had given him at the outset of the voyage. Darwin also discovered fossil remains of giant extinct mammals, including Megatherium and Toxodon, in the Pampas of Argentina, and was struck by the relationship between these extinct forms and the living species of the continent.

The visit to the Galápagos Islands in September and October 1835 proved particularly significant. Darwin noted that the mockingbirds differed from island to island, and was later informed that the giant tortoises also showed island-specific variation. Although the full importance of the Galápagos observations only became clear to Darwin after his return to England, these patterns of geographical distribution would become central evidence for his theory of descent with modification.

The publication of Darwin's journal of the voyage, initially as part of FitzRoy's Narrative in 1839 and subsequently as a standalone volume (later known as The Voyage of the Beagle), established Darwin as a popular and respected author.

Development of the Theory of Natural Selection (1836–1858)

Upon returning to England in October 1836, Darwin settled in London. With a £400 annual allowance from his father, he was free to devote himself to science. He began distributing his specimens to specialist naturalists for identification and description. The ornithologist John Gould informed him that the Galápagos birds Darwin had thought were a mix of unrelated species were in fact a closely related group of finches, each adapted to a different island — a finding that further stimulated Darwin's thinking about species transmutation.

Between 1837 and 1839, Darwin filled a series of notebooks with ideas on the transmutation of species. In September 1838, he read Thomas Robert Malthus's An Essay on the Principle of Population and was struck by the insight that in the struggle for survival, favourable variations would tend to be preserved and unfavourable ones destroyed. This, he recognised, provided a mechanism by which species could change over time — what he called "natural selection," drawing an analogy to the artificial selection practised by animal breeders.

Despite having formulated the essentials of his theory, Darwin did not rush to publish. He devoted years to meticulous research, gathering evidence from animal breeding, botany, geology, and biogeography. He also undertook major scientific projects in parallel, most notably an exhaustive taxonomic study of barnacles (Cirripedia), both living and fossil, which occupied him from 1846 to 1854 and produced four monographs. This work earned him the Royal Medal from the Royal Society in 1853 and gave him invaluable expertise in the variation within species — evidence directly relevant to his evolving theory.

Darwin's careful strategy was disrupted in June 1858, when he received a letter from Alfred Russel Wallace, a younger naturalist working in the Malay Archipelago, outlining a theory of natural selection virtually identical to his own. Dismayed but honourable, Darwin arranged, with the help of Lyell and the botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker, for a joint presentation of both men's papers to the Linnean Society of London on 1 July 1858. The presentation attracted relatively little immediate attention, but it spurred Darwin to write an "abstract" of his theory — the work that became On the Origin of Species.

On the Origin of Species (1859)

On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life was published on 24 November 1859 by John Murray. The entire first printing of 1,250 copies sold out on the first day. The book presented a vast body of evidence — from geology, palaeontology, embryology, biogeography, and comparative anatomy — in support of two central propositions: that all species had descended with modification from common ancestors, and that the principal mechanism of this evolutionary change was natural selection.

The publication provoked fierce debate. While many scientists were persuaded by the evidence for descent with modification, the mechanism of natural selection was more contentious. The botanist Asa Gray championed Darwin's ideas in the United States, while Thomas Henry Huxley became a forceful public advocate in Britain, earning the nickname "Darwin's Bulldog." Opposition came from various quarters, including the anatomist Richard Owen and the Anglican bishop Samuel Wilberforce, who clashed with Huxley at the famous 1860 Oxford debate. Darwin himself, suffering from chronic ill health, largely avoided public confrontation, preferring to pursue his research quietly at his home, Down House, in Kent.

Later Works and Publications

Following the success of On the Origin of Species, Darwin continued to produce a remarkable body of work that extended and reinforced his theory of evolution. On the Various Contrivances by which British and Foreign Orchids are Fertilised by Insects (1862) demonstrated the intricate coevolutionary relationships between orchids and their pollinators, providing detailed evidence of natural selection in action.

Darwin's most controversial work during his lifetime was The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871), in which he applied the theory of evolution explicitly to human beings. The book argued that humans had evolved from an earlier primate ancestor, a proposition that aroused intense public debate. It also introduced the concept of sexual selection — the idea that competition for mates could drive the evolution of traits that were not directly related to survival, such as the peacock's tail.

In 1872, Darwin published The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, one of the earliest scientific works on comparative psychology. The book was notable for its use of photographs to illustrate emotional expressions across species, making it one of the first scientific books to feature photographic plates as evidence.

Darwin's later years were marked by continued productivity despite persistent health problems. He published works on climbing plants (1875), insectivorous plants (1875), cross- and self-fertilisation in plants (1876), and the different forms of flowers on plants of the same species (1877). His final book, The Formation of Vegetable Mould, through the Actions of Worms (1881), examined the role of earthworms in soil ecology — a pioneering study in what would later be called ecosystem ecology.

Scientific Method and Working Habits

Darwin's scientific method was characterised by painstaking observation, the accumulation of vast quantities of evidence, and extensive correspondence with naturalists, breeders, and other informants around the world. His surviving correspondence, comprising over 15,000 letters, is a major resource for the history of science and is maintained by the Darwin Correspondence Project.

Darwin worked methodically at Down House, following a strict daily routine that accommodated his chronic illness. He typically worked in his study in the morning, took walks on the Sandwalk (a gravel path he called his "thinking path") around the grounds, and continued his correspondence and lighter reading in the afternoon and evening. Much of his experimental work was conducted in the gardens and greenhouses of Down House, where he carried out long-term studies on plant variation, movement, and fertilisation.

Personal Life

On 29 January 1839, Darwin married his first cousin, Emma Wedgwood, daughter of Josiah Wedgwood II. The couple lived initially in London before moving in 1842 to Down House in the village of Downe, Kent, where Darwin would reside for the rest of his life. Together they had ten children, of whom seven survived to adulthood. The deaths of three children in infancy and childhood — most devastatingly that of their eldest daughter Annie in 1851 at the age of ten — caused Darwin profound grief and may have influenced his growing agnosticism.

Darwin suffered throughout his adult life from a mysterious chronic illness whose symptoms included nausea, heart palpitations, trembling, and fatigue. The cause of his illness has been debated by medical historians, with hypotheses ranging from Chagas disease (possibly contracted during the Beagle voyage) to a psychosomatic condition related to anxiety over his revolutionary ideas. Regardless of its origin, the illness frequently confined him to his home and limited his ability to attend scientific meetings or social events.

In matters of religion, Darwin's views evolved over the course of his life. He had studied for the clergy at Cambridge and initially accepted William Paley's argument from design, but the accumulation of evidence for evolution and the suffering he witnessed in nature — combined with the personal tragedy of Annie's death — led him to describe himself as an agnostic in later life. His wife Emma, a devout Unitarian, was troubled by his loss of faith, and the couple's correspondence on the subject reveals a tender and respectful disagreement.

Darwin died on 19 April 1882 at Down House. Although he had expected to be buried in the churchyard at Downe, a public and parliamentary campaign led to his interment in Westminster Abbey, near the grave of Isaac Newton.

Recognition

During his lifetime, Darwin received numerous scientific honours. He was awarded the Royal Medal by the Royal Society in 1853 for his work on geology and zoology, the Wollaston Medal by the Geological Society of London in 1859, and the Copley Medal — the Royal Society's highest honour — in 1864. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1839 and held memberships in numerous foreign academies and learned societies.

Darwin's burial in Westminster Abbey in 1882 was a recognition of his standing not only as a scientist but as a figure of national and international importance. The funeral was attended by representatives of the scientific establishment, the church, and the state.

In the modern era, Darwin's legacy is celebrated annually on Darwin Day, observed on 12 February, his birthday. Universities and scientific institutions around the world organise lectures, exhibitions, and research events in his honour. In 2026, the University of North Dakota's Biology Department celebrated the 217th anniversary of Darwin's birth with a research poster presentation event, while the University of Hawaii's Insect Museum held a public programme featuring scientific discovery activities. Texas A&M University's Ecology and Evolutionary Biology programme similarly hosted Darwin Day 2026 as a free public science festival.

Darwin's preserved specimens continue to be objects of scientific study. In 2026, researchers used laser spectroscopy to perform non-invasive chemical analysis of specimens Darwin had collected, solving long-standing questions about the contents of preservation jars in museum collections and improving techniques for long-term conservation.

Numerous institutions bear Darwin's name, including Charles Darwin University in Australia, the Darwin Medal awarded by the Royal Society, and the town of Darwin in Australia's Northern Territory.

Legacy

Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection is the unifying framework of modern biology. His proposition that all species of life have descended from common ancestors through a branching pattern of modification is considered a fundamental scientific concept, underpinning disciplines from genetics and molecular biology to ecology, palaeontology, and medicine. The modern evolutionary synthesis, which emerged in the 1930s and 1940s through the integration of Darwinian natural selection with Mendelian genetics, validated the mechanism Darwin had proposed and established it as the central explanatory framework of evolutionary biology.

Darwin's influence extends well beyond the biological sciences. His ideas have shaped fields as diverse as psychology (through his work on the expression of emotions), anthropology, philosophy, and the social sciences. The concept of evolution by natural selection has been applied — sometimes controversially — to economics, political theory, and cultural studies. His emphasis on empirical evidence, long-term observation, and the testing of hypotheses against data from multiple sources remains a model for scientific practice.

The ongoing relevance of Darwin's work is illustrated by contemporary research that continues to build on his insights. In 2026, researchers published findings tracing the evolution of the vertebrate eye back to a single ancestral form — a question that Darwin himself had identified as a challenge to his theory, famously writing in On the Origin of Species that the evolution of the eye seemed "absurd in the highest possible degree" to suppose had occurred by natural selection, though he went on to provide a persuasive argument for how it could have happened through gradual modification.

Darwin's complete publications, manuscripts, and a substantial portion of his correspondence are freely available online through the Darwin Online project and the Darwin Correspondence Project, ensuring that his writings remain accessible to scholars and the general public alike. The American Museum of Natural History also maintains a major digital resource devoted to Darwin's life and work.