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Adolescence and Education
Darwin was the second son of society doctor Robert Waring Darwin and of Susannah Wedgwood, daughter of the Unitarian pottery industrialist Josiah Wedgwood. Darwin’s mother died when he was eight, and he was cared for by his three elder sisters. The boy stood in awe of his overbearing father, whose astute medical observations taught him much about human psychology. -
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The Voyage
The circumnavigation of the globe would be the making of the 22-year-old Darwin. Five years of physical hardship and mental rigour, imprisoned within a ship’s walls, offset by wide-open opportunities in the Brazilian jungles and the Andes Mountains, were to give Darwin a new seriousness. As a gentleman naturalist, he could leave the ship for extended periods, pursuing his own interests. As a result, he spent only 18 months of the voyage aboard the ship. -
Summary
Darwin was born in 1809 and raised in Shrewsbury, England. At 21 years of age, Darwin set out on a voyage from 1831-1836 to study his hypothesis on the biological correlation between humans and other animals. His most successful work was done in the Galapagos, where he studied finches and mockingbirds in the most detail compared to other animals. -
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The Proof
Anatomist Richard Owen found that Darwin’s Uruguay River skull belonged to Toxodon, a hippopotamus-sized antecedent of the South American capybara. The Pampas fossils were nothing like rhinoceroses and mastodons; they were huge extinct armadillos and sloths, which suggested that South American mammals had been replaced by their own kind according to some unknown “law of succession.” At the Zoological Society, ornithologist John Gould announced that the Galapagos birds were all ground finches. -
Greatest Accomplishment
Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection is the foundation upon which modern evolutionary theory is built. The theory was outlined in Darwin’s seminal work On the Origin of Species, published in 1859. Although Victorian England (and the rest of the world) was slow to embrace natural selection as the mechanism that drives evolution, the concept of evolution itself gained widespread traction by the end of Darwin’s life. -
The Result
He worked on his theory for more than 20 years before publishing it in his famous On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859). The book was immediately in great demand, and Darwin’s intensely controversial theory was accepted quickly in most scientific circles; most opposition came from religious leaders. Though Darwin’s ideas were modified by later developments in genetics and molecular biology, his work remains central to modern evolutionary theory.