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- Verywell Mind - Charles Darwin: Biography, Theories, Contributions
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Charles Darwin
What is Charles Darwin famous for?
Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution bynatural selection is the foundation upon which modern evolutionary theory is built. The theory was outlined in Darwin’s seminal workOn 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.
What is evolution, as Charles Darwin understood it?
Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution had three main components: that variation occurred randomly among members of a species; that an individual’s traits could be inherited by its progeny; and that the struggle for existence would allow only those with favorable traits to survive. Although many of his ideas have been borne out by modern science, Darwin didn’t get everything right: traces ofJean-Baptiste Lamarck’s outdated theory of evolution remained in Darwin’s own. He was also unable to correctly establish how traits were inherited, which wasn’t clarified until the rediscovery ofGregor Mendel’s work with peas.
What was Charles Darwin’s educational background?
Growing up, Charles Darwin was always attracted to the sciences. In 1825 his father sent him to theUniversity of Edinburgh to study medicine. There he was exposed to many of the dissenting ideas of the time, including those of Robert Edmond Grant, a former student of the French evolutionistJean-Baptiste Lamarck. He transferred to Christ’s College, Cambridge, in 1828, where his mentors mostly endorsed the idea of providential design. A botany professor suggested he join a voyage on theHMSBeagle—a trip that would provide him with much of his evidence for the theory of evolution bynatural selection.
What was Charles Darwin’s family life like?
Charles Darwin was born in England to a well-to-do family in 1809. His father was a doctor, and his mother—who died when he was only eight years old—was the daughter of a successful 18th-century industrialist. Darwin was not the first of his family to gravitate toward naturalism: his father’s father,Erasmus Darwin, was a physician, inventor, and poet who had developed his own theories on the evolution of species. Darwin later married his first cousin on his mother’s side, Emma Wedgwood. Together they had 10 children, 3 of whom died at a young age.
What were the social impacts of Charles Darwin’s work?
Charles Darwin’s theories hugely impacted scientific thought. But his ideas also affected the realms of politics, economics, and literature. More insidious were the ways that Darwin’s ideas were used to support theories such associal Darwinism andeugenics, which usedbiological determinism to advocate for the elimination of people deemed socially unfit. Although Darwin himself was an abolitionist, the social Darwinist ideas inspired by his work contributed to some of the most racist and classist social programs of the last 150 years.
Charles Darwin (born February 12, 1809, Shrewsbury,Shropshire, England—died April 19, 1882, Downe, Kent) was an English naturalist whosescientific theory ofevolution bynatural selection became the foundation of modern evolutionary studies. Anaffable country gentleman,Darwin at first shocked religious Victorian society by suggesting that animals and humans shared a common ancestry. However, his nonreligiousbiology appealed to the rising class of professional scientists, and by the time of his death evolutionary imagery had spread through all ofscience, literature, and politics. Darwin, himself anagnostic, was accorded the ultimate Britishaccolade of burial inWestminster Abbey, London.
Darwin formulated his bold theory in private in 1837–39, after returning from a voyage around the world aboardHMSBeagle, but it was not until two decades later that he finally gave it full public expression inOn the Origin of Species (1859), a book that has deeply influenced modern Western society and thought.
Early life and education
Darwin was the second son of society doctor Robert Waring Darwin and of Susannah Wedgwood, daughter of theUnitarian pottery industrialistJosiah Wedgwood. Darwin’s other grandfather,Erasmus Darwin, a freethinking physician and poet fashionable before theFrench Revolution, was author ofZoonomia; or the Laws of Organic Life (1794–96). 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, whoseastute medical observations taught him much about human psychology. But he hated the rotelearning of Classics at the traditionalAnglicanShrewsbury School, where he studied between 1818 and 1825. Science was then considered dehumanizing in English public schools, and for dabbling inchemistry Darwin was condemned by his headmaster (and nicknamed “Gas” by his schoolmates).
His father, considering the 16-year-old a wastrel interested only in game shooting, sent him to studymedicine atEdinburgh University in 1825. Later in life, Darwin gave the impression that he had learned little during his two years atEdinburgh. In fact, it was a formative experience. There was no better science education in a British university. He was taught to understand the chemistry of coolingrocks on theprimitiveEarth and how to classifyplants by the modern “natural system.” At the Edinburgh Museum he was taught to stuffbirds by John Edmonstone, a freed South Americanslave, and to identify the rock strata and colonial flora and fauna.
More crucially, the university’s radical students exposed the teenager to the latest Continental sciences. Edinburgh attracted EnglishDissenters who were barred from graduating at the Anglican universities ofOxford andCambridge, and at student societies Darwin heard freethinkers deny the Divine design of human facialanatomy and argue thatanimals shared all thehuman mental faculties. One talk, on the mind as the product of a materialbrain, was officially censored, for suchmaterialism was considered subversive in theconservative decades after the French Revolution. Darwin was witnessing the social penalties of holdingdeviant views. As he collectedsea slugs andsea pens on nearby shores, he was accompanied by Robert Edmond Grant, a radical evolutionist anddisciple of the French biologistJean-Baptiste Lamarck. An expert onsponges, Grant became Darwin’s mentor, teaching him about the growth and relationships of primitive marineinvertebrates, which Grant believed held the key to unlocking the mysteries surrounding the origin of more-complex creatures. Darwin, encouraged to tackle the larger questions of life through a study of invertebratezoology, made his own observations on the larval sea mat (Flustra) and announced his findings at the student societies.
The young Darwin learned much in Edinburgh’s richintellectualenvironment, but not medicine: he loathedanatomy, and (pre-chloroform) surgery sickened him. His freethinking father, shrewdly realizing that the church was a better calling for an aimless naturalist, switched him to Christ’s College, Cambridge, in 1828. In a complete change of environment, Darwin was now educated as an Anglican gentleman. He took hishorse, indulged his drinking, shooting, and beetle-collecting passions with other squires’ sons, and managed 10th place in the Bachelor of Arts degree in 1831. Here he was shown the conservative side ofbotany by a young professor, the ReverendJohn Stevens Henslow, while that doyen of Providential design in theanimal world, the ReverendAdam Sedgwick, took Darwin toWales in 1831 on a geologic field trip.
- In full:
- Charles Robert Darwin
- Born:
- February 12, 1809,Shrewsbury,Shropshire,England
- Died:
- April 19, 1882, Downe, Kent (aged 73)
- Awards And Honors:
- Copley Medal (1864)
- Notable Works:
- “On the Various Contrivances by Which British and Foreign Orchids Are Fertilised by Insects”
- “Origin of Species”
- “The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex”
- “The Different Forms of Flowers on Plants of the Same Species”
- “The Effects of Cross and Self Fertilization in the Vegetable Kingdom”
- “The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals”
- “The Formation of Vegetable Mould, Through the Action of Worms”
- “The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication”
- Notable Family Members:
- sonSir George Darwin
- On the Web:
- ABC listen - Overnights - Charles Darwin (Feb. 06, 2026)
Fired byAlexander von Humboldt’s account of the South American jungles in hisPersonal Narrative of Travels, Darwin jumped at Henslow’s suggestion of a voyage toTierra del Fuego, at the southern tip ofSouth America, aboard a rebuiltbrig, HMSBeagle. Darwin would not sail as a lowly surgeon-naturalist but as a self-financed gentleman companion to the 26-year-old captain,Robert Fitzroy, an aristocrat who feared the loneliness of command. Fitzroy’s was to be an imperial-evangelical voyage: he planned to survey coastalPatagonia tofacilitate British trade and return three “savages” previously brought toEngland from Tierra del Fuego and Christianized. Darwin equipped himself with weapons, books (Fitzroy gave him the first volume ofPrinciples of Geology, byCharles Lyell), and advice on preserving carcasses fromLondon Zoo’s experts. TheBeagle sailed from England on December 27, 1831.
