Charles Robert Darwin Biography

World of Sociology on Charles Robert Darwin

The English naturalist Charles Robert Darwin (1809-1882) discovered that natural selection was the agent for the transmutation of organisms during evolution, as did Alfred Russel Wallace independently. Darwin presented his theory in Origin of Species.

The concept of evolution by descent dates at least from classical Greek philosophers. In the eighteenth century Carl Linnaeus postulated limited mutability of species by descent. But most naturalists were concerned with identifying species, the stability of which was considered essential for their work. Natural theology regarded the perfection of adaptation between structure and mode of life in organisms as evidence for a predetermined divine plan.

Charles Lyell wrote his Principles of Geology (1830-1833), which Darwin on his Beagle circumnavigation found extremely useful. Fossils in South America and apparent anomalies of animal distribution triggered the task for Darwin of assembling a vast range of material. Reading Thomas Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population in 1838 allowed Darwin to complete his evolutionary conceptual scheme.

Recent study of Darwin's unpublished manuscripts and entire works reveal a continuity of purpose and integrity of effort to establish the high probability of the genetic relationship through descent in all forms of life. Darwin work created a paradigm shift of consummate importance to the history of science and ideas.

Darwin was born on February 12, 1809, at Shrewsbury, the fifth child of the eminent medical doctor Robert Darwin and Susannah Wedgwood Darwin, daughter of the famous potter Josiah Wedgwood. In 1825 Darwin went to Edinburgh University to study medicine, but he found anatomy and materia medica dull and surgery unendurable. In 1828 he entered Christ's College, Cambridge, with the idea of taking Anglican orders. He attended Henslow's course in botany, started his famous beetle collection, and read widely, especially Paley's Natural Theology (1802). He graduated with a divinity degree in 1831. He married Emma Wedgwood, his first cousin, in 1839; they had ten children, four of whom became scientists.

Darwin became the naturalist on H. M. S. Beagle for a five-year voyage to survey the coast of Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego and complete observations of longitude by circumnavigation. The Beagle left on December 27, 1831, and returned on October 2, 1836. During the voyage Darwin spent 535 days at sea and roughly 1200 on land. Adequate identification of strata could be done on the spot, but sufficiently accurate identification of living organisms required systematists accessible only in London and Paris.

During the trip Darwin discovered the relevance of Lyell's uniformitarian views to the structure of St. Jago (Cape Verde Islands). He found, for example, that small locally living forms closely resembled large terrestrial fossil mammals embedded between marine shell layers and that the local sea was populated with living occupants of similar shells. He also observed the overlapping distribution on the continuous Patagonian plain of two closely related but distinct species of ostrich. He observed the differences between species of birds and animals on the Galápagos Islands.

Darwin's Journal of Researches was published in 1839. With the help of a government grant toward the cost of the illustrations, the Zoology of the Voyage of the Beagle was published, in five quarto volumes, from 1839 to 1843. Two themes run through his valuable and mostly neglected notes: distribution in space and time and observations of behavior as an aid to species diagnosis. Darwin abandoned the idea of fixity of species in 1837 while writing his Journal. A second edition, in 1845, had a stronger tinge of transmutation, but there was still no public avowal. This delightful volume is his most popular and accessible work.

Darwin's Transmutation (Species) Notebooks (1837-1839) have been reconstructed. The notion of "selection owing to struggle" derived from his reading of Malthus in 1838. The breadth of interest and profusion of hypotheses characteristic of Darwin, who could carry several topics in his mind at the same time, inform the whole. From this medley of facts allegedly assembled on Baconian principles all his later works derive.

After the 1846 publication of his geological observations of South America, he started a paper on his "first Cirripede," a shell-boring aberrant barnacle, no bigger than a pin's head, he had found at Chonos Island in 1835. This was watched while living, then dissected, and drawn while the Beagle sheltered from a week of severe storms. The working out of the relationship to other barnacles forced him to study all barnacles, a task that occupied him until 1854 and resulted in two volumes on living forms and two on fossil forms.

In 1855 Darwin began to study the practices of poultry and pigeon fanciers and worldwide domesticated breeds, conducted experiments on plant and animal variation and its hereditary transmission, and worried about the problem of plant and animal transport across land and water barriers, for he was persuaded of the importance of isolation for speciation. Darwin's "principle of divergence" recognizes that the dominant species must make more effective use of the territory it invades than a competing species and accordingly it becomes adapted to more diversified environments.

On June 14, 1858, Darwin received Alfred Russel Wallace's essay containing the theory of evolution by natural selection--the same theory Darwin was working on. Wallace had intuited the theory without doing research. A joint paper by Wallace and Darwin was presented at a meeting of the Linnaean Society.

In 1859, Darwin published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. Spencer's phrase "survival of the fittest" was misleading because the essence of Darwin's theory is that, unlike natural theology, adaptation must not be too perfect and rigid. Darwin's book secured worldwide attention and aroused impassioned controversy.

Darwin published on many topics, plants becoming an increasing preoccupation. Papers he published in 1864 were collected into The Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants (1875), and these ideas were further generalized on uniformitarian lines and published as The Power of Movement in Plants (1880). Darwin's last work was The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms, with Observations on Their Habits (1881). He died on April 19, 1882, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.