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Charles Darwin
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Charles Darwin (1809-1882) was the fourth child of Dr. Robert Darwin and grandson of Erasmus Darwin. Much of Charles' childhood was spent collecting insects, coins and reading various literature on natural history, travel and poetry. Charles Darwin was not a scholarly student during his years at Edinburgh Medical College. He disliked what was taught and found most of the lectures boring, yet he developed a natural interest in studying rocks and fossils. He convinced his father that he could not be a doctor as his father had wished, so instead Charles Darwin studied Theology at the University of Cambridge. After his studies he was given the opportunity to travel on the H.M.S. Beagle as a naturalist. Darwin took this opportunity and it is this voyage that propelled him to begin his work on evolution.
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In 1838 and until 1841, Charles Darwin was secretary of the Geological Society in London and wrote three works about his trip and in 1842 wrote his first draft on the origin of species at the age of 33. In 1844, he expanded it and in 1855, began a correspondence with Asa Gray, the United States naturalist, followed by a letter explaining his views in 1857. Meanwhile, sometime during 1856, Sir Charles Lyell, author of Principles of Geology (1830), urged Charles to prepare a third and more extensive treatise. That summer when Darwin was about half-finished he received a manuscript from Alfred Wallace, who was then in the Moluccas. Coincidently, Charles found it to be nearly identical to his own theory of natural selection and that they were both familiar with the same earlier published works on population by Thomas R. Malthus and Lyell’s views on geology, both had studied fauna, flora and geological formations in island groups and were both experienced in observing a wide variety of species. With nearly identical backgrounds, they came to the same conclusions.
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Charles Darwin (1809-1882), like many people of genius, did not at first appear to have extraordinary talents. From a young age Darwin disliked school and preferred observing birds and collecting insects to study. He was sent to medical school in Scotland when he was 16. Young Darwin found medicine "intolerably dull." He was much more interested in attending natural history lectures. Seeing that Darwin lacked enthusiasm for becoming a doctor, his father suggested he study for the clergy.
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Charles Darwin had an instrumental part in bringing the theory of evolution to light. His revolutionary ideas on evolution sparked controversy and shed light on many unanswered questions that the scientific community had about the subject during the nineteenth century. The "Voyage of the Beagle" and "The Origin of Species" were his most read books on the subject that he studied. His theory of evolution was a drastic proposition for the time, but he quickly gained numerous followers in both the scientific community and from the public.
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Charles Darwin died on 19 April 1882, at the age of 73. To some it was deplorable that he should have departed an unbeliever, and in the years that followed several stories surfaced that Darwin had undergone a death-bed conversion and renounced evolution. These stories began to be included in sermons as early as May 1882.1 However, the best known is that attributed to a Lady Hope, who claimed she had visited a bedridden Charles at Down House2 in the autumn of 1881. She alleged that when she arrived he was reading the Book of Hebrews, that he became distressed when she mentioned the Genesis account of creation, and that he asked her to come again the next day to speak on the subject of Jesus Christ to a gathering of servants, tenants and neighbours in the garden summer house which, he said, held about 30 people. This story first appeared in print as a 521-word article in the American Baptist journal, the Watchman Examiner,3 and since then has been reprinted in many books, magazines and tracts.
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In 1831, "Charles Darwin" sailed as a passenger on the HMS Beagle. His five-year voyage took him to the coasts of South America, where he observed various kinds of animals. One set of creatures in particular, the Galapagos finches, caught Darwin's attention. He studied the birds, collected samples, and observed that they had various beak sizes and shapes. These observed variations inspired the initial development of Darwin's "Theory of Origins." He returned to England in 1836.
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Charles Darwin