Charles Darwin - Biography, Inventions and Achievements

Charles Robert Darwin, FRS was an English naturalist. He established that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestors, and proposed the scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called natural selection, in which the struggle for existence has a similar effect to the artificial selection involved in selective breeding. Darwin published his theory of evolution with compelling evidence in his 1859 book On the Origin of Species, overcoming scientific rejection of earlier concepts of transmutation of species.

By the 1870s the scientific community and much of the general public had accepted evolution as a fact. However, many favoured competing explanations and it was not until the emergence of the modern evolutionary synthesis from the 1930s to the 1950s that a broad consensus developed in which natural selection was the basic mechanism of evolution. In modified form, Darwin's scientific discovery is the unifying theory of the life sciences, explaining the diversity of life.

Darwin's early interest in nature led him to neglect his medical education at the University of Edinburgh; instead, he helped to investigate marine invertebrates. Studies at the University of Cambridge encouraged his passion for natural science. His five-year voyage on HMS Beagle established him as an eminent geologist whose observations and theories supported Charles Lyell's uniformitarian ideas, and publication of his journal of the voyage made him famous as a popular author.

Puzzled by the geographical distribution of wildlife and fossils he collected on the voyage, Darwin began detailed investigations and in 1838 conceived his theory of natural selection. Although he discussed his ideas with several naturalists, he needed time for extensive research and his geological work had priority. He was writing up his theory in 1858 when Alfred Russel Wallace sent him an essay which described the same idea, prompting immediate joint publication of both of their theories.

Darwin's work established evolutionary descent with modification as the dominant scientific explanation of diversification in nature. In 1871 he examined human evolution and sexual selection in The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, followed by The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. His research on plants was published in a series of books, and in his final book, he examined earthworms and their effect on soil.

Inventions, Achievements and Brief Introduction of Charles Darwin

• Charles Robert Darwin was born in Shrewsbury, Shropshire, England on 12 February 1809 at his family home, The Mount, He was the fifth of six children of wealthy society doctor and financier Robert Darwin, and Susannah Darwin (née Wedgwood). 
• He was the grandson of Erasmus Darwin on his father's side, and of Josiah Wedgwood on his mother's side.
• His five-year voyage on HMS Beagle established him as an eminent geologist whose observations and theories supported Charles Lyell's uniformitarian ideas, and publication of his journal of the voyage made him famous as a popular author.
• Darwin investigated the transmutation of species and conceived his theory of natural selection in 1838.
• His research on plants was published in a series of books, and in his final book, he examined earthworms and their effect on soil.
• In recognition of Darwin's pre-eminence as a scientist, he was one of only five nineteenth-century non-royal personages from the United Kingdom to be honoured by a state funeral.
• Both families were largely Unitarian, though the Wedgwoods were adopting Anglicanism. Robert Darwin, himself quietly a freethinker, had baby Charles baptised in November 1809 in the Anglican St Chad's Church, Shrewsbury, but Charles and his siblings attended the Unitarian chapel with their mother. 
• The eight-year-old Charles already had a taste for natural history and collecting when he joined the day school run by its preacher in 1817. That July, his mother died. From September 1818 he joined his older brother Erasmus attending the nearby Anglican Shrewsbury School as a boarder.
• Darwin spent the summer of 1825 as an apprentice doctor, helping his father treat the poor of Shropshire, before going to the University of Edinburgh Medical School with his brother Erasmus in October 1825. He found lectures dull and surgery distressing, so neglected his studies. 
• He learned taxidermy from John Edmonstone, a freed black slave who had accompanied Charles Waterton in the South American rainforest, and often sat with this "very pleasant and intelligent man".
• Darwin was sick to his stomach most of the time on the Beagle, which is one of the main reasons he spent as much time as possible on land and not on the ship. That illness probably helped him collect more data than he might have.
• Darwin delayed the publication of On the Origin of Species for more than two decades after he was convinced of his theory, because he was nervous about how it would be received.
• In the late 1850s, it became clear to Darwin that British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace also had come up with a similar theory of evolution. This sparked Darwin into high gear to finish On the Origin of Species. Scientists with the Linnean Society of London resolved the "who was first" question by presenting both men's work jointly in July 1858. Darwin later got most of the credit for evolutionary theory, because he had worked out the theory in greater detail.
• The publication of Darwin's and Wallace's work was a non-event at first. The president of the Linnean Society said in May 1859 that there had been no big discoveries in the past year.
• Darwin was a conventional Christian for much of his life. He studied at the University of Cambridge to become an Anglican clergyman, just prior to the Beagle voyage. Later in life, he described himself as agnostic, not atheist.
• In Darwin's second year he joined the Plinian Society, a student natural history group whose debates strayed into radical materialism. He assisted Robert Edmond Grant's investigations of the anatomy and life cycle of marine invertebrates in the Firth of Forth, and on 27 March 1827 presented at the Plinian his own discovery that black spores found in oyster shells were the eggs of a skate leech. 
• One day, Grant praised Lamarck's evolutionary ideas. Darwin was astonished by Grant's audacity, but had recently read similar ideas in his grandfather Erasmus' journals. Darwin was rather bored by Robert Jameson's natural history course which covered geology including the debate between Neptunism and Plutonism. 
• He learned classification of plants, and assisted with work on the collections of the University Museum, one of the largest museums in Europe at the time.
• This neglect of medical studies annoyed his father, who shrewdly sent him to Christ's College, Cambridge, for a Bachelor of Arts degree as the first step towards becoming an Anglican parson. As Darwin was unqualified for the Tripos, he joined the ordinary degree course in January 1828. 
• He preferred riding and shooting to studying. His cousin William Darwin Fox introduced him to the popular craze for beetle collecting; Darwin pursued this zealously, getting some of his finds published in Stevens' Illustrations of British entomology. He became a close friend and follower of botany professor John Stevens Henslow and met other leading naturalists who saw scientific work as religious natural theology, becoming known to these dons as "the man who walks with Henslow". 
• When his own exams drew near, Darwin focused on his studies and was delighted by the language and logic of William Paley's Evidences of Christianity. In his final examination in January 1831 Darwin did well, coming tenth out of 178 candidates for the ordinary degree.

Superb Quotes by Charles Darwin

• A man who dares to waste an hour of time has not discovered the value of life.
• The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.
• There is no fundamental difference between man and the higher mammals in their mental faculties.... The difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind.
• The love for all living creatures is the most noble attribute of man.
• We will now discuss in a little more detail the Struggle for Existence.
• The highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognize that we ought to control our thoughts.
• An American Monkey after getting drunk on Brandy would never touch it again, and thus is much wiser than most men.”
• Mathematics seems to endow one with something like a new sense.”
• Every new body of discovery is mathematical in form, because there is no other guidance we can have.
• Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.”
• If I had my life to live over again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once a week for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied would have thus been kept active through use. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.”
• Mathematics seems to endow one with something like a new sense.
• I hate a Barnacle as no man ever did before, not even a Sailor in a slow-sailing ship.
• I have rarely read anything which has interested me more, though I have not read as yet more than a quarter of the book proper. From quotations which I had seen, I had a high notion of Aristotle's merits, but I had not the most remote notion what a wonderful man he was. Linnaeus and Cuvier have been my two gods, though in very different ways, but they were mere schoolboys to old Aristotle.
• As for a future life, every man must judge for himself between conflicting vague probabilities.
• Animals, whom we have made our slaves, we do not like to consider our equal.”
•  To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I confess, absurd in the highest degree.
• Science consists in grouping facts so that general laws or conclusions may be drawn from them.