Charles Darwin was born into the wealthy professional upper class of early British bourgeois society. His father had an established medical practice; his grandfather Erasmus Darwin was a physician and author of Zoonomia, or the Laws of Organic Life.Naturalist who laid the foundation for the theory of evolution, b. 12 February 1809 (Shrewsbury, England), d. 19 April 1882 (Downe, Kent, England).
Charles Darwin was born into the wealthy professional upper class of early British bourgeois society. His father had an established medical practice; his grandfather Erasmus Darwin was a physician and author of Zoonomia, or the Laws of Organic Life.
At school Charles showed an interest in chemistry and specimen collection, activities considered a waste of time by the headmaster, who rebuked Charles for his lack of interest in classical education. His father, disappointed by Charles' lack of interest in medicine, sent him in 1827 to the University of Canterbury to study divinity.
At university Darwin concentrated more on riding, hunting, shooting and socializing than studying but kept both his interest in science and his general adherence to Christian beliefs of the time. The cleric John Stevens Henslow, an accomplished botanist, took him on walks through the countryside and encouraged Darwin's interest in nature observation. Henslow recommended Darwin to Adam Sedgwick, professor of geology at Cambridge, who took him on a three-week tour through North Wales and introduced him to geological field work.
In 1831 the 22 year old Darwin was invited, on Henslow's recommendation, to participate in a voyage of the navy ship Beagle to South America and the Pacific Islands to establish chronometer stations. Darwin joined the voyage as an unpaid naturalist and social companion of the aristocratic young captain. The planned two-year voyage developed into a five-year exploration of the world.
When the Beagle set sail from Plymouth on 27 December 1831, the prevailing view among geologists was that the surface of the earth was shaped by a few violent events that would form entire mountain chains and oceans in very short time. Darwin had taken the first volume of Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology along, which offered the dissenting view that the earth's surface evolved slowly through events such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and erosion. During his voyage Darwin noticed elevated ancient coastlines, verified their character by identifying shell fossils, and witnessed his first earthquake. He became convinced of Lyell's ideas and contributed to them by writing home on issues such as the dynamics of coral reefs, which he correctly explained as biological growth on a slowly sinking sea floor.
On his return to England in 1836 Darwin was recoganized as an established scientist, made a fellow of the Geological Society, became a member of its council, and was elected to the Royal Society in 1839.
Meanwhile, the many plant and animal species collected during the voyage had been catalogued and classified by specialists in Cambridge and London. When reviewing this material Darwin developed his theory of evolution by natural selection. He saw the similarities between species at far apart places and noticed that the slight differences between, for example, tortoises on the Galapagos Islands and the South American mainland were adaptations to the environment. He came to the conclusion that the species were not a fixed and permanent result of divine creation but evolved in response to changes in their environment.
Darwin perceived very clearly the revolutionary novelty of his theory. He was a man of traditional Christian beliefs but could not ignore the facts of his observations. He suffered physically from this; vomiting, insomnia, painful flatulence made him nearly an invalid before he turned 40. His illness has beeen the subject of much speculation, and some prefer to ascribe it to Chagas' disease or some other tropical affliction. The fact that his health improved dramatically whenever he concentrated on such uncontroversial studies as the life of barnacles or the action of worms in the formation of mould suggests that his suffering was psychosomatic.
By 1844 Darwin's friends had seen a long manuscript, but Darwin was not prepared to publish his theory. Fourteen years later the naturalist Alfred Russell Wallace, who worked in the Malay archipelago, sent Darwin a paper that contained the same theory of evolution in all clarity. Darwin could hide his own ideas no longer, and on 1 July 1858 a joint paper of Darwin and Wallace was given at the Linnean Society of London.
Within months Darwin now prepared his On the origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. It was published on 24 November 1859, sold out within weeks and was reprinted six times before 1872.
The ideas of evolution and competition for resources in the environment were not new. Many naturalists had described the struggle between species for survival. Darwin expanded the idea to competition of individuals within each species. Unlike others, who described the variations within a species as spontaneous and chaotic, Darwin saw them as elements of systematic evolution towards better adaptation.
While Darwin's works on geology have been superseded by the discovery of plate tectonics, his groundbreaking work on evolution has become one of the foundation stones of modern science.
There can be no doubt that the time was ripe to discover the laws of evolution. Just as the wealth of new astronomical data during the late 16th and early 17th century forced the abandonment of the idea that the Earth is the centre of the universe, the wealth of new data on the living world that accompanied the colonial expansion of capitalism had to result in the abandonment of the idea of creation. Darwin struggled with the same problem that Galilei had confronted 200 years earlier and was acutely aware of it. But his hesitation to publish his discoveries was less founded in possible danger of persecution by the church than in his desire not to offend.
The church did, of course, oppose the idea of evolution. But the bourgeois society of the 19th century no longer supported the idea of a god-given structure of society and the universe, which was the ideological basis of feudalism to which Galilei's scientific findings posed a real threat. The ruling class of 19th century England had made the "survival of the fittest" the basic law of its society and could easily reconcile Darwin's scientific findings with its own ideology.
Darwin's strength was his reliance on observational facts, his ability to distill principles from a bewildering set of data and his unwavering adherence to scientific methods. While the circumstances thus favoured the discovery of the mechanisms of evolution, it was Darwin who formulated them.
Kevles, B. (1995) Charles Darwin, Encyclopaedia Britannica 15th ed.