| Darwin, Charles |
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English scientist (1809-1892) |  |
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He was born in Shrewsbury to a moderately wealthy family with a strong intellectual heritage. His grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, was a physician, poet and biologist who laid some of the groundwork for the grandson's revolutionary ideas. Charles attended Christ's College at Cambridge with initial thoughts of entering the clergy, but soon took up studies in biology, zoology and geology. From 1831 to 1836, he served as naturalist aboard the HMS Beagle on its scientific mission to South America and the Pacific. Back in England, he published a series of scientific treatises which established his reputation as one of the prominent thinkers of his day. From 1842 onwards, he lived on a country estate in Kent and pursued his studies among its gardens and livestock. |
 | | Charles Darwin | | © 1997 State Historical Society of Wisconsin |
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By 1844, he had written the initial draft of his groundbreaking treatise on evolution and natural selection. However, he left this work unpublished for several years, preferring to refine and elaborate its core ideas. In 1858, he read a forthcoming paper by fellow scientist Alfred Russell Wallace whose thesis closely paralleled Darwin's own unpublished ideas, an event which pushed Darwin to go public with his own research. Both Wallace's and Darwin's papers were presented to the Linnean Society in a famous July, 1858 meeting. Darwin published The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection in 1859, sparking decades of contentious debate which ultimately led to the universal scientific recognition of Darwin's thesis. In later years, he developed his ideas further in monographs on different types of plant and animal life.
SOURCE: Larousse Biographical Dictionary. |
