Charles Robert Darwin
Marina Volkova
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Content
Life of Darwin
Journey of the Beagle
nception of Darwin's evolutionary theory
Darwin's children
Darwin 2009 commemorations
Life of Darwin
Charles Robert Darwin was born in Shrewsbury, Shropshire, England on 12 February 1809 at his family home, the Mount.[15]
He was the fifth of six children of wealthy society doctor and financier Robert Darwin, and Susannah Darwin. He was the grandson of Erasmus Darwin on his father's side, and of Josiah Wedgwood on his mother's side. Both families were largely Unitarian, though the Wedgwood was adopting Anglicanism. Robert Darwin, himself quietly a freethinker, had baby Charles baptised in the Anglican Church, but Charles and his siblings attended the Unitarian chapel with their mother. The eight year old Charles already had a taste for natural history and collecting when he joined the day school run by its preacher in 1817. That July, his mother died. From September 1818, he joined his older brother Erasmus attending the nearby Anglican Shrewsbury School as a boarder.
Darwin spent the summer of 1825 as an apprentice doctor, helping his father treat the poor of Shropshire, before going to the University of Edinburgh with his brother Erasmus in October 1825. He found lectures dull and surgery distressing, so neglected his medical studies. He learned taxidermy from John Edmonstone, a freed black slave who had accompanied Charles Waterton in the South Americanrainforest, and often sat with this "very pleasant and intelligent man".
In Darwin's second year he joined the Plinian Society, a student natural history group whose debates strayed into radicalmaterialism. He assisted Robert Edmund Grant's investigations of the anatomy and life cycle of marine invertebrates in the Firth of Forth, and in March 1827 presented at the Plinian his own discovery that black spores found in oyster shells were the eggs of a skate leech. One day, Grant praised Lamarck'sevolutionary ideas. Darwin was astonished, but had recently read the similar ideas of his grandfather Erasmus and remained indifferent. Darwin was rather bored by Robert Jameson's natural history course which covered geology including the debate between Neptunism and Plutonism. He learned classification of plants, and assisted with work on the collections of the University Museum, one of the largest museums in Europe at the time.
This neglect of medical studies annoyed his father, who shrewdly sent him to Christ's College, Cambridge, for a Bachelor of Arts degree as the first step towards becoming an Anglican parson. Darwin began there in January 1828, but preferred riding and shooting to studying. His cousin William Darwin Fox introduced him to the popular craze for beetle collecting which he pursued zealously, getting some of his finds published in Stevens'Illustrations of British entomology
. He became a close friend and follower of botany professor John Stevens Henslow and met other leading naturalists who saw scientific work as religious natural theology, becoming known to these dons as "the man who walks with Henslow". When exams drew near, Darwin focused on his studies and was delighted by the language and logic of William Paley's Evidences of Christianity
. In his final examination in January 1831 Darwin did well, coming tenth out of a pass list of 178.
Darwin had to stay at Cambridge until June. He studied Paley's Natural Theology
which made an argument for divine design in nature, explaining adaptation as God acting through laws of nature. He read John Herschel's new book which described the highest aim of natural philosophy as understanding such laws through inductive reasoning based on observation, and Alexander von Humboldt's Personal Narrative
of scientific travels. Inspired with "a burning zeal" to contribute, Darwin planned to visit Tenerife with some classmates after graduation to study natural history in the tropics. In preparation, he joined Adam Sedgwick's geology course, then went with him in the summer to map strata in Wales. After a fortnight with student friends at Barmouth, he returned home to find a letter from Henslow proposing Darwin as a suitable (if unfinished) gentleman naturalist for a self-funded place with captain Robert FitzRoy, more as a companion than a mere collector, on HMS Beagle
which was to leave in four weeks on an expedition to chart the coastline of South America. His father objected to the planned two-year voyage, regarding it as a waste of time, but was persuaded by his brother-in-law, Josiah Wedgwood, to agree to his son's participation.
Journey of the Beagle
The voyage of the Beagle
Beginning on the 27th of December, 1831, the voyage lasted almost five years and, as Fitzroy had intended, Darwin spent most of that time on land investigating geology and making natural history collections, while the Beagle
surveyed and charted coasts. He kept careful notes of his observations and theoretical speculations, and at intervals during the voyage his specimens were sent to Cambridge together with letters including a copy of his journal for his family. He had some expertise in geology, beetle collecting and dissecting marine invertebrates, but in all other areas was a novice and ably collected specimens for expert appraisal. Despite repeatedly suffering badly from seasickness while at sea, most of his zoology notes are about marine invertebrates, starting with plankton collected in a calm spell.
On their first stop ashore at St. Jago, Darwin found that a white band high in the volcanic rock cliffs included seashells. Fitzroy had given him the first volume of Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology
which set out uniformitarian concepts of land slowly rising or falling over immense periods, and Darwin saw things Lyell's way, theorising and thinking of writing a book on geology. In Brazil, Darwin was delighted by the tropical forest, but detested the sight of slavery.
At Punta Alta in Patagonia he made a major find of fossil bones of huge extinct mammals in cliffs beside modern seashells, indicating recent extinction with no signs of change in climate or catastrophe. He identified the little known Megatherium
by a tooth and its association with bony armour which had at first seemed to him like a giant version of the armour on local armadillos. The finds brought great interest when they reached England. On rides with gauchos into the interior to explore geology and collect more fossils he gained social, political and anthropological insights into both native and colonial people at a time of revolution, and learnt that two types of rhea had separate but overlapping territories. Further south he saw stepped plains of shingle and seashells as raised beaches showing a series of elevations. He read Lyell's second volume and accepted its view of "centre’s of creation" of species, but his discoveries and theorising challenged Lyell's ideas of smooth continuity and of extinction of species.
As HMS Beagle
surveyed the coasts of South America, Darwin theorised about geology and extinction of giant mammals.
Three Fuegians on board, who had been seized during the first Beagle
voyage and had spent a year in England, were taken back to Tierra del Fuego as missionaries. Darwin found them friendly and civilised, yet their relatives seemed "miserable, degraded savages", as different as wild from domesticated animals. To Darwin the difference showed cultural advances, not racial inferiority. Unlike his scientist friends, he now thought there was no unbridgeable gap between humans and animals. A year on, the mission had been abandoned. The Fuegian they'd named Jemmy Button lived like the other natives, had a wife, and had no wish to return to England.
Darwin experienced an earthquake in Chile and saw signs that the land had just been raised, including mussel-beds stranded above high tide. High in the Andes he saw seashells, and several fossil trees that had grown on a sand beach. He theorised that as the land rose, oceanic islands sank, and coral reefs round them grew to form atolls.
On the geologically new Galápagos Islands Darwin looked for evidence attaching wildlife to an older "centre of creation", and found mockingbirds allied to those in Chile but differing from island to island. He heard that slight variations in the shape of tortoise shells showed which island they came from, but failed to collect them, even after eating tortoises taken on board as food. In Australia, the marsupialrat-kangaroo and the platypus seemed so unusual that Darwin thought it was almost as though two distinct Creators had been at work. He found the Aborigines &
The Beagle
investigated how the atolls of the Cocoas (Keeling) Islands had formed, and the survey supported Darwin's theorising. Fitzroy began writing the official Narrative
of the Beagle
voyages, and after reading Darwin's diary he proposed incorporating it into the account. Darwin's Journal
was eventually rewritten as a separate third volume, on natural history.
In Cape Town Darwin and Fitzroy met John Herschel, who had recently written to Lyell praising his uniformitarian’s as opening bold speculation on "that mystery of mysteries, the replacement of extinct species by others" as "a natural in contradistinction to a miraculous process». When organising his notes as the ship sailed home, Darwin wrote that if his growing suspicions about the mockingbirds, the tortoises and the Falkland Island Fox were correct, "such facts undermine the stability of Species", then cautiously added "would" before "undermine». He later wrote that such facts "seemed to me to throw some light on the origin of species".
Inception of Darwin's evolutionary theory
While still a young man, Charles Darwin joined the scientific elite
When the Beagle
reached Falmouth, Cornwall, on 2 October 1836, Darwin was already a celebrity in scientific circles as in December 1835 Henslow had fostered his former pupil's reputation by giving selected naturalists a pamphlet of Darwin's geological letters. Darwin visited his home in Shrewsbury and saw relatives, then hurried to Cambridge to see Henslow, who advised on finding naturalists available to catalogue the collections and agreed to take on the botanical specimens. Darwin's father organised investments, enabling his son to be a self-funded gentleman scientist, and an excited Darwin went round the London institutions being fêted and seeking experts to describe the collections. Zoologists had a huge backlog of work, and there was a danger of specimens just being left in storage.
Charles Lyell eagerly met Darwin for the first time on 29 October and soon introduced him to the up-and-coming anatomist Richard Owen, who had the facilities of the Royal College of Surgeons to work on the fossil bones collected by Darwin. Owen's surprising results included other gigantic extinct ground sloths as well as the Megatherium
, a near complete skeleton of the unknown Scelidotherium
and a hippopotamus-sized rodent-like skull named Toxodon
resembling a giant capybara. The armour fragments were actually from Glyptodont
, a huge armadillo-like creature as Darwin had initially thought. These extinct creatures were related to living species in South America.
In mid-December Darwin took lodgings in Cambridge to organise work on his collections and rewrite his Journal
. He wrote his first paper, showing that the South American landmass was slowly rising, and with Lyell's enthusiastic backing read it to the Geological Society of London on 4 January 1837. On the same day, he presented his mammal and bird specimens to the Zoological Society. The ornithologist John Gould soon announced that the Galapagos birds that Darwin had thought a mixture of blackbirds, "gros-beaks" and finches, were, in fact, twelve separate species of finches. On 17 February Darwin was elected to the Council of the Geological Society, and Lyell's presidential address presented Owen's findings on Darwin's fossils, stressing geographical continuity of species as supporting his uniformitarian ideas.
Early in March, Darwin moved to London to be near this work, joining Lyell's social circle of scientists and experts such as Charles Babbage, who described God as a programmer of laws. John Herschel's letter on the "mystery of mysteries" of new species was widely discussed, with explanations sought in laws of nature, not ad hoc miracles. Darwin stayed with his freethinking brother Erasmus, part of this Whig circle and close friend of writer Harriet Martineau who promoted Malthusianism underlying the controversial Whig Poor Law reforms to stop welfare from causing overpopulation and more poverty. As a Unitarian she welcomed the radical implications of transmutation of species, promoted by Grant and younger surgeons influenced by Geoffrey, but anathema to Anglicans defending social order.
In their first meeting to discuss his detailed findings, Gould told Darwin that the Galápagos mockingbirds from different islands were separate species, not just varieties, and the finch group included the "wrens". Darwin had not labeled the finches by island, but from the notes of others on the Beagle
, including Fitzroy, he allocated species to islands. The two rheas were also distinct species, and on 14 March Darwin announced how their distribution changed going southwards.
In mid-July 1837 Darwin started his "B" notebook on Transmutation of Species
, and on page 36 wrote "I think" above his first evolutionary tree.
By mid-March, Darwin was speculating in his Red Notebook
on the possibility that "one species does change into another" to explain the geographical distribution of living species such as the rheas, and extinct ones such as the strange Macrauchenia
, resembling a giant guanaco. His thoughts on lifespan, asexual reproduction and sexual reproduction developed in his "B" notebook around mid-July on to variation in offspring "to adapt & alter the race to changing
world" explaining the Galápagos tortoises, mockingbirds and rheas. He sketched branching descent, then a genealogical branching of a single evolutionary tree, in which "It is absurd to talk of one animal being higher than another", discarding Lamarck's independent lineages progressing to higher forms.
Darwin's Children
William Erasmus Darwin
(27 December 1839–1914)
Anne Elizabeth Darwin
(2 March 1841–23 April 1851)
Mary Eleanor Darwin
(23 September 1842–16 October 1842)
Henrietta Emma "Etty" Darwin
(25 September 1843–1929)
George Howard Darwin
(9 July 1845–7 December 1912)
Elizabeth "Bessy" Darwin
(8 July 1847–1926)
Francis Darwin
(16 August 1848–19 September 1925)
Leonard Darwin
(15 January 1850–26 March 1943)
Horace Darwin
(13 May 1851–29 September 1928)
Charles Waring Darwin
(6 December 1856–28 June 1858)
Darwin's children
| Leonard Darwin | (15 January 1850–26 March 1943) |
| Horace Darwin | (13 May 1851–29 September 1928) |
| Charles Waring Darwin | (6 December 1856–28 June 1858) |
Darwin 2009 commemorations
Two pound coin commemorating Darwin's birth and publication of On the Origin of Species
.
Darwin Day has become an annual celebration, and the bicentenary of Darwin's birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species
were celebrated by events and publications around the world. The Darwin exhibition, after opening at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City in 2006, was shown at the Museum of Science, Boston, the Field Museum in Chicago, the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, then from 14 November 2008 to 19 April 2009 in the Natural History Museum, London, as part of the Darwin200
programme of events across the United Kingdom. It also appears at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome from 12 February to 3 May 2009. The University of Cambridge featured a festival in July 2009. His birthplace is celebrating with "Darwin's Shrewsbury 2009 Festival" events during the year.
In the United Kingdom a special commemorative issue of the two pound coin shows a portrait of Darwin facing a chimpanzee surrounded by the inscription 1809 DARWIN 2009, with the edge inscription ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES 1859. Collector versions of the coin have been released at a premium, and during the year the coins will be available from banks and post offices at face value. To celebrate Darwin's life and achievements, the BBC has commissioned numerous television and radio programmes known collectively as the BBC Darwin Season.
In September 2008, the Church of England issued an article saying that the 200th anniversary of his birth was a fitting time to apologise to Darwin "for misunderstanding you and, by getting our first reaction wrong, encouraging others to misunderstand you still".
A dramatic motion picture entitled Creation
was released in 2009, joining a short list of film dramas about Darwin, including The Darwin Adventure
, released in 1972.