- Born in Shrewsbury, England, Feb. 12, 1809, Darwin was the fifth child of a wealthy and sophisticated English family. 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.
- he met two stellar figures: Adam Sedgwick, a geologist, and John Stevens Henslow (1795-1861), 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 22year-old Darwin was taken aboard the English survey ship HMS Beagle as an unpaid naturalist on a scientific expedition around the world.
- In his geological observations, Darwin was most impressed with the effect that natural forces had on shaping the earth's surface, his job aboard the Beagle allowed him to observe the various formations found on different continents and islands along the way, as well as a huge variety of fossils and living organisms.
- The catastrophist viewpoint was the predominant viewpoint at the time which was relative to the popular biblical story of Noah and the Ark. The catastrophic viewpoint (but not the immutability of species) was challenged by the English geologist Sir Charles Lyell in his two-volume work Principles of Geology (1830-33). Lyell maintained that the earth's surface is undergoing constant change, the result of natural forces operating uniformly over long periods.
Main Achievements
- Theory of Natural Selection - 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 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 On the Origin of Species. His later books includingThe Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication (1868), The Descent of Man (1871), and The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals (1872) were detailed expositions of topics that had been confined to small sections of the Origin. The importance of 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 Down, Kent, on April 19, 1882.
Main Contributions to Field
- Darwin found himself fitting many of his observations into Lyell's general uniformitarian view. However, he realized that some of his own observations of fossils and living plants and animals cast doubt on the Lyell-supported view that species were specially created. For example, certain fossils of supposedly extinct species closely resembled living species in the same geographical area. In the Galapagos Islands, off the coast of Ecuador, he also observed that each island supported its own form of tortoise, mockingbird, and finch; the various forms were closely related but differed in structure and eating habits from island to island. Both observations raised the question, for Darwin, of possible links between distinct but similar species.
- Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection is essentially that, because of the food-supply problem described by Malthus, the young born to any species intensely compete for survival. Those young that survive to produce the next generation tend to embody favorable natural variations (however slight the advantage may be) the process of natural selection and these variations are passed on by heredity. Therefore, each generation will improve adaptively over the preceding generations, and this gradual and continuous process is the source of the evolution of species. Natural selection is only part of Darwin's vast conceptual scheme; he also introduced the concept that all related organisms are descended from common ancestors. Moreover, he provided additional support for the older concept that the earth itself is not static but evolving.
Quotes
An American monkey, after getting drunk on brandy, would never touch it again, and thus is much wiser than most men.
In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.
It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.
http://charles-darwin.classic-literature.co.uk/charles-darwin-biography.asp
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/darwin_charles.shtml
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/c/charles_darwin.html
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