Darwin, Charles Robert
(1809-1882), British scientist, who laid the foundation of modern evolutionary
theory with his concept of the development of all forms of life through
the slow-working process of natural selection. His work was of major influence
on the life and earth sciences and on modern thought in general.
Born in Shrewsbury,
Shropshire, England, on February 12, 1809, Darwin was the fifth child
of a wealthy and sophisticated English family. His maternal grandfather
was the successful china and pottery entrepreneur Josiah Wedgwood; his
paternal grandfather was the well-known 18th-century physician and savant
Erasmus Darwin. After graduating from the elite school at Shrewsbury in
1825, young Darwin went to the University of Edinburgh to study medicine.
In 1827 he dropped out of medical school and entered the University of
Cambridge, in preparation for becoming a clergyman of the Church of England.
There he met two stellar figures: Adam Sedgwick, a geologist, and John
Stevens Henslow, a naturalist. Henslow not only helped build Darwin’s
self-confidence but also taught his student to be a meticulous and painstaking
observer of natural phenomena and collector of specimens. After graduating
from Cambridge in 1831, the 22-year-old Darwin was taken aboard the English
survey ship HMS Beagle, largely on Henslow’s recommendation, as an
unpaid naturalist on a scientific expedition around the world.
After returning to
England in 1836, Darwin began recording his ideas about changeability
of species in his Notebooks on the Transmutation of Species. Darwin’s
explanation for how organisms evolved was brought into sharp focus after
he read An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), by the British
economist Thomas Robert Malthus, who explained how human populations remain
in balance. Malthus argued that any increase in the availability of food
for basic human survival could not match the geometrical rate of population
growth. The latter, therefore, had to be checked by natural limitations
such as famine and disease, or by social actions such as war.
Darwin’s theory
was first announced in 1858 in a paper presented at the same time as one
by Alfred Russel Wallace, a young naturalist who had come independently
to the theory of natural selection. Darwin’s complete theory was
published in 1859, in On the Origin of Species. Often referred to as the
“book that shook the world,” the Origin sold out on the first
day of publication and subsequently went through six editions.
Darwin spent the rest
of his life expanding on different aspects of problems raised in the Origin.
His later books—including The Variation of Animals and Plants Under
Domestication (1868), The Descent of Man (1871), and The Expression of
the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872)—were detailed expositions
of topics that had been confined to small sections of the Origin. His
work was well recognized by his contemporaries; Darwin was elected to
the Royal Society (1839) and the French Academy of Sciences (1878). He
was also honored by burial in Westminster Abbey after he died in Downe,
Kent, on April 19, 1882.
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