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As naturalist aboard the HMS Beagle, Charles Darwin closely observed various species. In 1859, his book On the Origin of Species was published, which explained how the struggle for survival would naturally tend to select traits that gave a competitive advantage. This theory of evolution by natural selection was accepted by the scientific community but refuted by the Christian clergy.
Charles Robert Darwin was born in Shrewsbury, England, on 12 February 1809, the son of the physician Robert Darwin and Susannah Wedgwood Darwin, of the Wedgwood pottery dynasty. Charles started work on a medical degree at Edinburgh University but, repelled by the sight of surgery performed without anesthetic, did not finish his studies. He later went to Cambridge University in preparation for becoming a clergyman in the Church of England.
In 1831 he took the post of “naturalist” aboard the HMS Beagle, under the command of Captain (later Admiral) Robert Fitzroy (1805–1865), on its surveying voyage to South America and the Pacific and Indian Oceans. On his return Darwin published an account of the journey, as the third volume of Fitzroy’s Narrative of the Surveying Voyages of the Adventure and Beagle (1839). Over the next four years he oversaw the publication of various reports, by experts of the day, on the mammal, bird, fish, and reptile specimens he had collected. He also wrote an important book on coral reefs and several monographs on fossil and living barnacles. When his travelogue was reissued in an enlarged edition as the Journal of Researches into the Natural History and Geology of the Countries Visited during the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle Round the World (1845), he received more widespread and popular acclaim.
Darwin had long pondered the variety of life. He was influenced by the geologist Charles Lyell (1797–1875), who outlined the idea that geological changes to the Earth had happened over millions of years, rather than the thousands of years deduced from the biblical account of Genesis and the great flood. The economist Thomas Malthus (1766–1834) had also written an influential book, An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), in which he argued that the population of the Earth could not expand forever and that at some point starvation, disease, pestilence, war, and other “natural” causes would prevent further increase.
During his travels, famously including those through the Galapagos Islands, Darwin had regularly come across unusual groups of very closely related species, which he likened to variations on a theme. Meanwhile through his gentlemanly pursuits, he had come across bird, dog, and horse breeders who had created new breeds that differed from one another as much as wild species might differ from each other. These discoveries stimulated Darwin to construct his theory of evolution by natural selection.
Darwin had been working on a manuscript for many years when, in June 1858, he received an essay from a fellow world traveler and naturalist, Alfred Russell Wallace (1823–1913). Wallace had independently arrived at exactly the same conclusion as Darwin: that the vast reproductive ability of living organisms, subtle variation within species, and the struggle for survival would result in the selection of any slight advantage and the inheritance of that advantage in future offspring.
Darwin was a famous naturalist while Wallace was younger and less well known, but Darwin knew he would have to publish or forfeit credit for the originality of his ideas. Through the support of his close colleagues Charles Lyell and the botanist Joseph Hooker (1817–1911), Darwin and Wallace presented a joint paper to the Linnean Society of London on 1 July 1858, and a year later Darwin’s most famous book, On the Origin of Species, was published.
The book soon generated a storm of controversy. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the study of natural science was intricately intertwined with an appreciation of the wonders of God’s creation—many of the most important naturalists of the day were clergymen. It was assumed that species were fixed, created by a divine hand and therefore immutable.
With Darwin and Wallace came, for the first time, an explanation of how species might change—an explanation that was coherent, plausible, and readily acceptable to the scientific community. It was not, however, acceptable to the clergy. They took Darwin’s book to suggest that the world had not, after all, been created in a week, that humankind had not been created in God’s image but had begun as something more primitive. To them, Darwin’s book reduced the story of Creation, and of Adam and Eve, to a myth.
Darwin died in 1882, without any formal state honor or recognition. Today, however, Darwin is recognized as one of the most important figures in the history of science and, with Wallace, is credited with producing the theory that still underlies all of biological science. Every aspect of the study of living things, from ecology to genetics, is underpinned by their original concept of evolution by natural selection.
Bibliography:
- Bettany, G. T. (1887). Life of Charles Darwin. London: Walter Scott.
- Burkhardt, F., et al. (1985–2001). The correspondence of Charles Darwin. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
- Darwin, C. ([1859] 1999). On the origin of species by means of natural selection, or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life. New York: Bantam.
- Darwin, C. (1868). The variation of animals and plants under domestication. London: John Murray.
- Darwin, C. (1871). The descent of man and selection in relation to sex. London: John Murray.
- Desmond, A., & Moore, J. R. (1992). Darwin. London: Penguin.
- Wallace, A. R. (1889). Darwinism. London: Macmillan.
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