Charles Darwin

Charles Darwin

Charles Robert Darwin (12 February 1809 - 19- April 1882) demonstrated that all species of life have evolved over time from common ancestors through the process he called natural selection. His theory of natural selection came to be widely seen as the primary explanation of the process of evolution in the 1930s, and now forms the basis of modern evolutionary theory.

His five-year voyage on HMS Beagle established him as an eminent geologist whose observations and theories supported Charles Lyell’s uniformitarian ideas, and publication of his journal of the voyage made him famous as a popular author.

His 1859 book On the Origin of Species established evolutionary descent with modification as the dominant scientific explanation of diversification in nature. He examined human evolution and sexual selection in The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, followed by The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. His research on plants was published in a series of books, and in his final book, he examined earthworms and their effect on soil.

Charles Robert Darwin was born in Shrewsbury, Shropshire, England on 12 February 1809 at his family home, the Mount. His father was a wealthy society doctor and financier Robert Darwin and mother was Susannah Darwin.

Robert Darwin, himself quietly a freethinker.

During his first Beagle voyage, Darwin found three Fuegians on board 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.

On the geologically new Galapagos Islands Darwin looked for evidence attaching wildlife to an older “centre of creation”, and found mocking birds allied to those in Chile but differing from island to island. He heard the tortoise shells slightly varied in shape, showing which island they came from. In Australia, the marsupial rat-kangaroo and the plays seem to unusual that Darwin thought it was most as though two distinct Creators had been at work. He found the Aborigine “good-humoured & pleasant”, and noted their depletion by European settlement.

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 17 February Darwin was elected to the Council of the Geographical Society and Lyell’s presidential address presented Owen’s findings on Darwin’s fossils, stressing geographical continuity of species as supporting his uniformitarian ideas.

In their first meeting to discuss his detailed findings, Gould told Darwin that the Galapagos mockingbirds from different islands were separate species, not just varieties, and the finch group included the “wrens”.

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 Macrauchenia like a giant guanaco.

On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (usually abbreviated to On the Origin of Species) proved unexpectedly popular, with the entire stock of 1,250 copies oversubscribed when it went on sale to booksellers on 22 November 1859. His only allusion to human evolution was the understatement that “light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history. His theory is simply stated in the introduction:

As many more individuals of each species are born than can possibly survive; and as, consequently, there is a frequently recurring struggle for existence, it follows that any being, if it vary however slightly in any manner profitable to itself, under the complex and sometimes varying conditions of life, will have a better chance of surviving, and thus be naturally selected. From the strong principle of inheritance, any selected variety will tend to propagate its new and modified form.

He put a strong case for common descent, but avoided the then controversial term “evolution”, and at the end of the book concluded that :

There is a grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

The Church of England’s response was mixed. Darwins old Cambridge tutors Sedgwick and Henslow dismissed the ideas, but liberal clergymen interpreted natural selection as an instrument of God’s design, with the cleric Charles Kingsley seeing it as “just as noble a conception of Deity”. In 1860, the publication of Essays and Reviews by seven liberal Anglican theologians diverted clerical attention from Darwin, with its ideas including higher criticism attacked by church authorities as heresy. In it, Baden Powell argued that miracles broke God’s laws, so belief in them was atheistic, and praised “Mr. Darwin’s masterly volume supporting the grand principle of the self-evolving powers of nature.”

In a legendary confrontation at the public 1860 Oxford evolution debate during a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, the Bishop of Oxford Samuel Wilberforce, though not opposed to transmutation of species, argued against Darwin’s explanation.

Even Darwin’s close friends Gray, Hooker, Huxley and Lyell still expressed various reservations but gave strong support, as did many others, particularly younger naturalists.

The Origin of Species was translated into many languages, becoming a staple scientific text attracting thoughtful attention from all walks of life, including the “working men” who flocked to Huxley’s lecture.

Darwin’s evolution-related experiments and investigations clulminated in books on the movement of climbing plants, insectivorous plants, the effects of cross and self fertilisation of plants, different forms of flowers on plants of the same species, and The Power of Movement in Plants. In his last book, he returned to the effect earthworms have on soil formation.

Darwing continued to play a leading part in the parish work of the local church, but from around 1849 would go for a walk on Sundays while his family attended church. Though reticent about his religious views, in 1879 he responded that he had never been an atheist in the sense of denying the existence of a God, and that generally “an Agnostic would be the more correct description of my state of mind.”

He died in Downe, Kent, England, on 19 April 1882. He was given a state funeral and buried in Westminister Abbey, close to John Herschel and Issac Newton. Only five non-royal personages were granted that honour of a UK state funeral during the 19th century.

Darwin 2009 commemorations

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 are being 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 Darwin 200 programme of events across the United Kingdom. The University of Cambridge features a festival in July 2009. His birth place 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 an ape surrounded by the inscription 1809 Darwin 2009, with the edge inscription ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES 1859. Collector versions of the coin will be released at a premium, and during the year the coins will be available from banks and post offices at face value.

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 out first reaction wrong, encouraging others to misunderstand you still.”