Charles Robert Darwin Wedgwood ( Shrewsbury , December to February of 1809 – Down House , 19 of April of 1882 ) was an English naturalist who postulated the theory of evolution : “All species of life have evolved over time from a common ancestor through a process called natural selection.
The Darwinian theory argues that environmental effects lead to differential reproductive success of individuals and groups of organisms. Natural selection tends to promote the survival of the fittest. This revolutionary theory was published in 1859 in the famous treatise The Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection .
Darwin’s work in other spheres is also relevant. His investigations in geology , zoology , taxonomy , botany , paleontology , philosophy , anthropology , psychology , literature and theology produced profound reactions among the scientific community of his time, many of which are still ongoing, making it very difficult to match his work. Darwin is one of the most original and influential scientists in the history of science, his writings are of interest to a very wide variety of readers.
Biographical synthesis
Early years
Charles Darwin was born in Sherewsbury on February 12 , 1809 . He was the second son of Robert Waring Darwin ( 1766 – 1848 ), a local physician of fame, and Susannah Wedgwood ( 1765 – 1817 ), daughter of a famous Stafford shire potter , Josiah Wedgwood , promoter of the construction of a canal to unite the region with the coasts and member of the Royal Society . His paternal grandfather, Erasmus Darwin He was also a well-known doctor and important naturalist of the 18th century , the author of an extensive poem in heroic couplets that presented an allegory of the Linnaean system of sexual classification of plants, which was a literary success of the time; Moreover, his theories about the inheritance of acquired characters were destined to fall into discredit precisely because of his grandson. In addition to his brother, five years older than him, Charles had three older sisters and a younger sister. After the death of his mother in July 1817 His education was spent at a local school and in his old age he remembered his experience there as the worst that could happen to his intellectual development. From childhood, he showed a taste for natural history that he considered innate and, especially, a great love for collecting things (shells, stamps, coins, minerals) as he himself writes in his autobiography :By the time I first went to school my taste for natural history, and more especially for collecting, has developed well. I tried to make the names of the plants, and collected all kinds of things, shells, stamps, sausages, coins and minerals. The passion for collecting, which leads a man to be a systematic naturalist, a virtuoso, or a miser, was very strong in me, and it was clearly innate, since none of my sisters or brothers have had this taste.
University studies
In October 1825 Darwin entered the University of Edinburgh to study medicine at the decision of his father, whom he always remembered with affection and admiration (and with a respect not without psychoanalytic connotations); the hypochondria of his adulthood combined distrust of physicians with boundless faith in paternal instinct and methods of treatment. However, Darwin failed to take an interest in the career; In addition to his disgust for surgical operations and the inability of the faculty to capture his attention, was added the growing conviction that his father’s inheritance would allow him a comfortable subsistence without the need to exercise a profession such as that of a doctor. So after two courses , his father, willing to prevent him from becoming an idle family son, proposed an ecclesiastical career to him. After resolving his own scruples about his faith, Darwin gladly accepted the idea of becoming a country clergyman and, in early 1828 , having refreshed his classical training, he entered Christ’s College, Cambridge .
More than from the academic studies he was forced to undertake, Darwin benefited at Cambridge from his voluntary attendance at the classes of the botanist and entomologist Reverend John Henslow , whose friendship brought him “an inestimable benefit” and who had an intervention He was directly involved in two events that determined his future: on the one hand, at the end of his studies in April 1831 , Henslow convinced him to take an interest in geology, a subject for which the classes he had received in Edinburgh had made him a real dislike, and introduced him to Adam Sedgwick, founder of the Cambrian system, who began precisely his studies on the same in an expedition to North Wales carried out in April of that same year in the company of Darwin (thirty years later, Henslow would be forced to defend the common disciple in the face of violent criticism directed by Sedgwick to evolutionary ideas); on the other hand, what is even more important, it was Henslow who gave Darwin the opportunity to embark as a naturalist with Captain Robert Fitzroy and accompany him on the voyage that he planned to undertake aboard the HMS Beagle around the world. .
His father initially opposed the project, stating that he would only change his mind if “someone with common sense” was able to consider the trip advisable. That someone was his uncle -and future father-in-law- Josiah Wedgwood , who interceded in favor of his young nephew fulfilling the objective of traveling that Darwin had set himself months before , when the reading of Humboldt aroused in him an immediate desire from visiting Tenerife and began to learn Spanish and inquire about ticket prices. The 27 as December as 1831 The Beagle sailed from Davenport with Darwin (only 22 years old) on board and ready to begin what he called his “second life”, after two months of discouraging wait in Plymouth, while the ship was repaired from the damage caused in his previous trip, and after the gale thwarted two attempts to start. During this time, Darwin experienced “palpitations and pains in the heart” of more than likely nervous origin, as perhaps his frequent prostrations would later be. Without knowing it, Darwin had run the risk of being rejected by Fitzroy, since he, a convinced follower of the physiognomic theories of the Swiss priest Johann Caspar Lavater He initially believed that the naturalist’s nose did not reveal sufficient energy and determination for the undertaking.
Research Vessel HMS Beagle
The ship sailed from the port of Portsmouth , the 27 of December of 1831 without suspecting its members, it would be for almost five years ( 1831 – 1836 ) that would make history.
The objective of the expedition led by Fitzroy was to complete the topographic study of the territories of Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego , the layout of the coasts of Chile , Peru and some Pacific islands and the realization of a chain of chronometric measurements. worldwide. The journey, which lasted almost five years, took Darwin along the coasts of South America , to return later during the last year visiting the Galapagos Islands , Tahiti , New Zealand , Australia , Mauritius and South Africa. During this period his mood underwent a profound transformation. The ancient passion for hunting survived the first two years with all its force and it was he himself who was in charge of shooting at the birds and animals that began to swell his collections; Little by little, however, this task was being entrusted to his servant as his attention became more and more absorbed by the scientific aspects of his activity. Charles Darwin’s Expedition on the HMS Beagle
The study of geology was, in the beginning, the factor that most contributed to making the trip the true formation of Darwin as a researcher, since with it the need to reason inexcusably came into play. Darwin took with him the first volume of the Principles of Geology by Charles Lyell , author of the so-called theory of current causes and who was to be his collaborator in the exposition of evolutionism; since the recognition of the first geological lands that he visited (the island of São Tiago , in Cape Verde), Darwin was convinced of the superiority of the approach advocated by Lyell. In Sao Tiago he had for the first time the idea that the white rocks he was observing had been produced by molten lava from ancient volcanic eruptions, which, when slipping to the bottom of the sea, would have dragged crushed shells and corals giving them rocky consistency. Towards the end of the voyage, Darwin learned that Sedgwick had expressed to his father the opinion that the young man would become an important scientist; the correct prognosis was the result of the reading by Henslow, before the Philosophical Society of Cambridge , of some of the letters sent by Darwin.
The theory about the formation of coral reefs by the growth of this one on the edges and on the tops of islands that were slowly sinking, was the first to see the light ( 1842) from among the scientific achievements made by Darwin during the trip. Along with this and the establishment of the geological structure of some islands such as Santa Elena, there is the discovery of the existence of a certain similarity between the fauna and flora of the Galapagos Islands and those of South America, as well as differences between the specimens of the same animal or plant collected on the different islands, which made him suspect that the theory of the stability of the species could be called into question. It was the theoretical elaboration of these observations that, years later, resulted in his statement of the evolutionary theses.
Return to england
Darwin returned to England on October 2 , 1836 ; The change experienced in those years must have been so remarkable that his father, “the most keen observer who has ever been naturally skeptical and who was far from believing in phrenology”, on seeing him again, ruled that the shape of his head had completely changed. His health had also deteriorated; towards the end of the voyage he became dizzy more easily than at the beginning, and in the fall of 1834 he had been ill for a month. It has been speculated that in March 1835 he contracted a latent infection called Chagas disease as a result of an insect bite. Anyway from his arrival until the beginning of 1839 Darwin lived through the most active months of his life, despite the loss of time caused by occasionally feeling unwell. He worked on the writing of his travel diary (published in 1839) and on the elaboration of two texts that presented his geological and zoological observations. Installed in London since March 1837, he devoted himself to “doing a little society”, acting as honorary secretary of the Geological Society and making contact with Lyell. In July of that year, he began to write his first notebook on his new views on the ‘transmutation of species’, which were imposed on him as he reflected on his own observations on classification, affinities and instincts. of the animals, and also as a result of an exhaustive study of how much information he was able to collect regarding the transformations experienced by species of plants and domestic animals due to the intervention of breeders and horticulturists.
Research
His research, conducted on the basis of “authentic Baconian principles,” soon convinced him that selection was the key to human success in obtaining useful improvements in plant and animal races. The possibility that this same selection acted on organisms living in a natural state became clear to him when, in October 1838, he read “as a pastime” Malthus’s essay on population, arranged as it was, by his lengthy observations on the habits of animals and plants, to perceive the universal presence of the struggle for existence, it occurred to him instantly that, under these circumstances, favorable variations would tend to be conserved, while unfavorable ones would disappear, with the result of the formation of new ones. species. Darwin estimated that, «at last,I had come up with a theory to work with ‘; However, concerned to avoid prejudice, he decided to abstain for a time from “writing even the most succinct outline of it.” In june In 1842 he allowed himself the private pleasure of a very brief summary -35 pages written in pencil-, which he expanded to 230 pages in the summer of 1844 .
The theory of evolution
During the first years of his stay at Down, Darwin completed the writing of his works on geological subjects and also took care of a new edition of his travel diary, which had originally appeared as part of Fitzroy’s published work on his expeditions; in autobiographical notes that wrote and published the 31 of March of 1876 (revealingly titled as Recollections of the Development of my Mind and Character ), Darwin acknowledged that “the success of this my first literary offspring always inflames my vanity more than that of any other of my books. From 1846 to 1854 Darwin was busy writing his monographs on the cirripods , in which he had become interested during his stay on the coasts of Chile when he found specimens of a type that posed classification problems. Those years of work served to turn him into a true naturalist according to the demands of his time, adding to the practical learning acquired during the trip the theoretical training necessary to tackle the problem of the relationships between natural history and taxonomy. In addition, his studies on barnacles gave him a solid reputation among specialists, being awarded in November 1853 by the Royal Society, of which Darwin had been a member since 1839 .
In early 1856 Lyell advised Darwin to work on the full development of his ideas about the evolution of species. Darwin then undertook the writing of a work which, although conceived on a scale three or four times greater than that of the actual published text, represented, in his opinion, a mere summary of the material collected on the matter. But, when he was halfway through work, his plans were derailed by an event that precipitated events: in the summer of 1858 he received a manuscript containing a brief but explicit exposition of a theory of evolution.by natural selection, which exactly matched his own views. The text, sent from the island of Ternate , in the Moluccas, was the work of Alfred Russell Wallace, a naturalist who had been in the Malay archipelago since 1854 and who, as early as 1856, had sent Darwin an article on the appearance of new species with which he felt widely identified. In his new job, Wallace spoke like Darwin, of “fighting for existence,” an idea that, curiously, had also been inspired by reading Malthus. Darwin gave Lyell a background on the matter and communicated his hesitations about how to proceed with the publication of his own theories, going so far as to state his intention to destroy his own writings rather than appear as a usurper of Wallace’s rights to priority. . The incident was resolved in a Solomonic way thanks to the intervention of Lyell and the botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker, future director of the Kew Gardens created by his father and one of the main defenders of Darwin’s evolutionary theories, with whom he became close friends since 1843. On the advice of both, Darwin summarized his manuscript, which was presented by Lyell and Hooker before the Linnean Society on July 1, 1858, together with Wallace’s work and with an extract from a letter sent by Darwin on September 5 , 1857 to the American botanist Asa Gray, which contained an outline of his theory. Wallace never questioned the correctness of the procedure; later, in 1887, he expressed his satisfaction with the way everything had developed, arguing that he did not possess:”Darwin’s love of work, experiment, and detail so preeminent, without which anything I could have written would never have convinced anyone.”
After the episode, Darwin was forced to put aside his hesitations as far as the publicity of his ideas was concerned and he tackled the task of reducing the scale of the work at hand in order to send it as soon as possible to the printing press; In “thirteen months and ten days of hard work,” the book On the Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life was finally written , of which the first 1,250 copies were they were sold on the same day they appeared, November 24 , 1859 .
Reactions
Reactions to The Origin of Species were immediate. Some biologists argued that Darwin could not test his hypothesis . Others criticized his concept of variation, arguing that he could neither explain the origin of variations nor how they were transmitted to successive generations. This particular objection was not answered until the birth of modern genetics in the early 20th century through Mendel’s Laws.. Many scientists continued to express their doubts for the next eighty years. However, the attacks on Darwin’s ideas that found the greatest echo did not come from his scientific opponents, but from his religious opponents. The idea that living things had evolved by natural processes denied the divine creation of man and seemed to place him on the same level as animals. Both ideas represented a grave threat to orthodox theology.
The theological implications of the work, which attributed to natural selection powers hitherto reserved to divinity, caused a fierce opposition to immediately begin to form, led by paleontologist Richard Owen , who twenty years earlier had enthusiastically welcomed the collections. of fossils brought by Darwin from his trip. In a memorable meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science held in Oxford the 30 of June of 1860 , Bishop Samuel Wilberforce as a spokesman for the party of Owen derided with brilliant eloquence evolutionary thesis, causing a replica strong by part of Thomas Henry Huxley , zoologist , who was the main defender before the religious opposition of the thesis of Darwin, earning the nickname of his bulldog. To Wilberforce’s question whether Huxley would have been indifferent to know that his grandfather had been a monkey, the immediate response was, according to Lyell’s testimony: “He would be in the same situation as his lordship.”
Charles Family – Emma
By then, Darwin had married his cousin Emma Wedgwood on January 29 , 1839. They resided in London until September 1842 , when the family settled in Down , in the county of Kent , seeking a way of life better suited to the frequent periods of illness which, after their return from their journey, constantly afflicted them. Darwin. For the rest, the London years were, as far as social life is concerned, a prelude to the almost total retirement in which he lived in Down until the end of his days. On December 27, 1839, the couple’s first child was born. and Darwin began with him a series of observations, which lasted over the years, on the expression of emotions in man and animals. He had ten children, six boys and four girls, born between 1839 and 1856 , of which two girls and one boy died in infancy.
Last stage of life
After harsh criticism for his ideas related to evolution, Darwin remained aloof from direct intervention in public controversy until 1871 , when his work The Descent of Man, and Selection in relation to Sex was published . and sexual selection), where he presented his arguments in favor of the thesis that man had appeared on Earth by exclusively natural means. Three years earlier his study on the variation in animals and plants by the effects of artificial selection had appeared, in which he tried to formulate a theory about the origin of life in general (“pangenesis”), which turned out to be the poorest of his contributions to biology. In 1872 , with The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals , a seminal work in what would later become the modern study of behavior, Darwin put an end to his concerns for theoretical problems and devoted the last ten years of his life to various investigations in the field of botany.
Darwin spent the rest of his life expanding on different aspects of the problems raised in On the Origin of Species . The importance of his work was widely recognized by his contemporaries. Darwin was elected a member of the Royal Society (1839) and of the French Academy of Sciences ( 1878 ). In late 1881 began serious suffering problems heart and died of an attack to the heart the 19 of April of 1882 Down Home, after his death he was paid the honor of being buried in Westminster Abbey .