Darwin, Charles Robert 1809-82
English naturalist, the originator (with Alfred Wallace) of the theory of evolution by natural selection

Charles Darwin was born in Shrewsbury, Shropshire, the grandson of Erasmus Darwin and of Josiah Wedgwood. He was educated at Shrewsbury grammar school, studied medicine at Edinburgh University (1825-27), and then, with a view to entering the church, entered Christ's College, Cambridge, in 1828. At Edinburgh he had joined the local Plinian Society; he took part in its natural history excursions, and read before it his first scientific paper - on Flustra or sea-mats. His biological studies began in earnest at Cambridge, where the botanist John Stevens Henslow encouraged his interest in zoology and geology. He was recommended by Henslow as naturalist to HMS Beagle, which was about to start for a scientific survey of South American waters (1831-36), captained by Robert Fitzroy.

Darwin visited Tenerife, the Cape Verde Islands, Brazil, Montevideo, Tierra del Fuego, Buenos Aires, Valparaiso, Chile, the Galapagos, Tahiti, New Zealand, Tasmania and the Keeling Islands; it was there that he started his seminal studies of coral reefs. During this long expedition he obtained an intimate knowledge of the fauna, flora and geology of many lands, which equipped him for his later many-sided investigations. By 1846 he had published several works on his geological and zoological discoveries on coral reefs and volcanic islands - works that placed him at once in the front rank of scientists. He formed a friendship with Charles Lyell, was Secretary of the Geological Society from 1838 to 1841, and in 1839 married his cousin, Emma Wedgwood (1808-96).

From 1842 he lived at Downe, Kent, enjoying his garden, conservatories, pigeons and fowls. The practical knowledge thus gained (especially as regards variation and interbreeding) proved invaluable; private means enabled him to devote himself unremittingly, in spite of continuous ill health, to science. At Downe he addressed himself to the great work of his life - the problem of the origin of species. After five years collecting the evidence, he 'allowed himself to speculate' on the subject, and drew up in 1842 some short notes, enlarged in 1844 into a sketch of conclusions for his own use. These embodied in embryo the principle of natural selection, the germ of the Darwinian theory; but Darwin delayed publication of his hypothesis, which was only precipitated by accident. In 1858 Wallace sent him a memoir on the Malay Archipelago, which, to Darwin's alarm, contained in essence the main idea of his own theory of natural selection. Lyell and Joseph Dalton Hooker persuaded him to submit a paper of his own, based on his 1844 sketch, which was read simultaneously with Wallace's before the Linnaean Society on 1 July 1858, although neither Darwin nor Wallace were present at that historic occasion.

Though not the sole originator of the theory of evolution, Darwin was the first thinker to gain for the concept a wide acceptance among biological experts. By adding his own specific idea of natural selection to the crude evolutionism of Erasmus Darwin, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and others, Darwin supplied to the idea a sufficient cause, which raised it at once from a hypothesis to a verifiable theory.

He was buried in Westminster Abbey. His son, Sir Francis Darwin (1848-1925), who was also a botanist, became a Reader in Botany at Oxford (1888) and produced Darwin's Life and Letters (1887-1903). Another son, Sir George Howard Darwin (1845-1913) was Professor of Astronomy at Cambridge (1883-1912).

Bibliography: At Downe, Darwin set about condensing a vast mass of notes, and assembled his great work, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, published in November 1859. This epoch-making work, received with great interest throughout Europe, was violently attacked and energetically defended; in the end it succeeded in obtaining recognition from almost all biologists of note. From the day of its publication, Darwin continued to work on a great series of supplemental treatises: The Fertilisation of Orchids (1862), The Variation of Plants and Animals under Domestication (1867) and The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871), which derived the human race from a hairy quadrumanous animal belonging to the great anthropoid group, and related to the progenitors of the orang-utan, chimpanzee and gorilla. In it Darwin also developed his important supplementary theory of sexual selection. Later works were The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1873), Insectivorous Plants (1875), Climbing Plants (1875), The Effects of Cross and Self Fertilisation in the Vegetable Kingdom (1876), Different Forms of Flowers in Plants of the same Species (1877), The Power of Movement in Plants (1880) and The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the action of Worms (1881).

Bibliography: John Bowlby, Charles Darwin: A Biography (1990); Peter Brent, Charles Darwin: A Man of Enlarged Curiosity (1981); Gavin de Beer, Charles Darwin: A Scientific Biography (1963).