Early life and education Charles Robert Darwin was born on 12 February 1809 at his family's home,
The Mount, in
Shrewsbury, Shropshire. He was the fifth of six children of wealthy society doctor and financier
Robert Darwin and
Susannah Darwin (née Wedgwood). His grandfathers
Erasmus Darwin and
Josiah Wedgwood were both prominent
abolitionists. Erasmus Darwin had praised general concepts of evolution and
common descent in his
Zoonomia (1794), a poetic fantasy of gradual creation including undeveloped ideas anticipating concepts his grandson expanded. . Part of
a double portrait showing him together with his sister Catherine. Both families were largely
Unitarian, though the Wedgwoods were adopting
Anglicanism. Robert Darwin, a
freethinker, had baby Charles
baptised in November 1809 in the Anglican
St Chad's Church, Shrewsbury, but Charles and his siblings attended the
local Unitarian Church 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 in attending the nearby Anglican
Shrewsbury School as a
boarder. Darwin spent the summer of 1825 as an apprentice doctor, helping his father treat impoverished people in Shropshire, before going to the well-regarded
University of Edinburgh Medical School with his brother Erasmus in October 1825. Darwin found lectures dull and surgery distressing, so he neglected his studies. He learned
taxidermy in around 40 daily hour-long sessions from
John Edmonstone, a
Black Briton from
Demerara in the South American
rainforest, who had been taught there by
Charles Waterton, and when brought to Scotland was freed from slavery. In Darwin's second year at the university, he joined the
Plinian Society, a student
natural-history group featuring lively debates in which
radical democratic students with
materialistic views challenged orthodox religious concepts of science. 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 geologyincluding the debate between
neptunism and
plutonism. He learned the
classification of plants. He assisted with work on the collections of the
University Museum, one of the largest museums in Europe at the time. Darwin's neglect of medical studies annoyed his father, who sent him to
Christ's College, Cambridge in January 1828 to study for a Bachelor of Arts degree as the first step towards becoming an Anglican country
parson. Darwin was unqualified for Cambridge's
Tripos exams and was required instead to join the ordinary degree course. He preferred
riding and
shooting to studying. At Cambridge, Darwin joined a society known as the "Glutton Club," which consumed "birds and beasts which were before unknown to human palate." Darwin would continue to eat the meat of exotic animals for the rest of his life; on the voyage of the
Beagle, he ate
puma,
iguanas,
giant tortoises,
armadillos, and mistakenly ate a
rhea which he intended to study. portrait by
Anthony Smith of Darwin as a student, in the courtyard at
Christ's College, Cambridge, where he had rooms. During the first few months of Darwin's enrolment at Christ's College, his second cousin
William Darwin Fox was still studying there. Fox impressed him with his butterfly collection, introducing Darwin to
entomology and influencing him to pursue
beetle collecting. He did this zealously and had some of his finds published in
James Francis Stephens'
Illustrations of British entomology (1829–1932). Through Fox, Darwin became a close friend and follower of botany professor
John Stevens Henslow. In his final examination in January 1831, Darwin did well, coming tenth out of 178 candidates for the
ordinary degree. Darwin had to stay at Cambridge until June 1831. He studied Paley's
Natural Theology or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity (first published in 1802), which made an
argument for divine design in nature, explaining
adaptation as God acting through
laws of nature. He read
John Herschel's new book,
Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy (1831), which described the highest aim of
natural philosophy as understanding such laws through
inductive reasoning based on observation, and
Alexander von Humboldt's
Personal Narrative of scientific travels in 1799–1804. Inspired with "a burning zeal" to contribute, Darwin planned to visit
Tenerife with some classmates after graduation to study natural history in the tropics. In preparation, he joined
Adam Sedgwick's geology course, then on 4 August travelled with him to spend a fortnight mapping
strata in Wales.
Survey voyage on HMS Beagle , 1831–1836 After leaving Sedgwick in Wales, Darwin spent a few days with student friends at
Barmouth. He returned home on 29 August to find a letter from Henslow proposing him as a suitable (if unfinished) naturalist for a self-funded
supernumerary place on with captain
Robert FitzRoy, a position for a
gentleman rather than "a mere collector". The ship was to leave in four weeks on an expedition to chart the coastline of South America. Robert Darwin objected to his son's planned two-year voyage, regarding it as a waste of time, but was persuaded by his brother-in-law,
Josiah Wedgwood II, to agree to (and fund) his son's participation. Darwin took care to remain in a private capacity to retain control over his collection, intending it for a major scientific institution. After delays, the voyage began on 27 December 1831; it lasted almost five years. As FitzRoy had intended, Darwin spent most of that time on land investigating geology and making natural history collections, while HMS
Beagle surveyed and charted coasts. He kept careful notes of his observations and theoretical speculations. At intervals during the voyage, his specimens were sent to Cambridge together with letters including a copy of
his journal for his family. He had some expertise in geology, beetle collecting and dissecting marine invertebrates, but in all other areas, was a novice and ably collected specimens for expert appraisal. Despite suffering badly from seasickness, Darwin wrote copious notes while on board the ship. Most of his zoology notes are about marine invertebrates, starting with
plankton collected during a calm spell. in Argentina, with fossils; caricature by
Augustus Earle, the initial ship's artist On their first stop ashore at
St Jago in Cape Verde, Darwin found that a white band high in the
volcanic rock cliffs included seashells. FitzRoy had given him the first volume of
Charles Lyell's
Principles of Geology, which set out
uniformitarian concepts of land slowly rising or falling over immense periods, and Darwin saw things Lyell's way, theorising and thinking of writing a book on geology. When they reached Brazil, Darwin was delighted by the
tropical forest, but detested the sight of
slavery there, and disputed this issue with FitzRoy. The survey continued to the south in
Patagonia. They stopped at
Bahía Blanca, and in cliffs near
Punta Alta, Darwin made a significant find of fossil bones of huge
extinct mammals beside modern seashells, indicating recent
extinction with no signs of change in climate or catastrophe. He found bony plates like a giant version of the armour on local
armadillos. From a jaw and tooth, he identified the gigantic
Megatherium, then from
Cuvier's description thought the armour was from this animal. The finds were shipped to England, and scientists found the fossils of great interest. On rides with
gauchos into the interior to explore geology and collect more fossils, Darwin gained social, political, and
anthropological insights into both native and colonial people at a time of revolution, and learnt that two types of
rhea had separate but overlapping territories. Further south, he saw stepped plains of shingle and seashells as
raised beaches at a series of elevations. He read Lyell's second volume and accepted its description of "centres of creation" of species, but his discoveries and theorising challenged Lyell's ideas of smooth continuity and of extinction of species. In
Tierra del Fuego, Darwin formed the incorrect belief that the archipelago was devoid of reptiles. Three
Fuegians on board, who had been seized during the
first Beagle voyage and then given Christian education in England, were returning with a missionary. Darwin found them friendly and civilised, yet at Tierra del Fuego he met "miserable, degraded savages", as different as wild from domesticated animals. He remained convinced that, despite this diversity, all humans were interrelated with
a shared origin and potential for improvement towards civilisation. Unlike his scientist friends, he now thought there was no unbridgeable gap between humans and animals. A year on, the mission had been abandoned. The Fuegian they had named
Jemmy Button lived like the other natives, had a wife, and had no wish to return to England. surveyed the coasts of South America, Darwin theorised about geology and the extinction of giant mammals. Watercolour by the ship's artist
Conrad Martens, who replaced Augustus Earle, in
Tierra del Fuego. Darwin experienced
an earthquake in Chile in 1835 and saw signs that the land had just been raised, including
mussel beds stranded above high tide. High in the
Andes, he saw seashells and several fossil trees that had grown on a sand beach. He theorised that as the land rose,
oceanic islands sank, and
coral reefs around them grew to form
atolls. On the geologically new
Galápagos Islands, Darwin looked for evidence attaching wildlife to an older "centre of creation". He found
mockingbirds allied to those in Chile but differing from island to island. He heard that slight variations in the shape of
tortoise shells showed which island they came from, but failed to collect them, even after eating tortoises taken on board as food. In Australia, the
marsupial rat-kangaroo and the
platypus seemed so unusual that Darwin thought it was almost as though two distinct Creators had been at work. He found the
Aboriginal Australians "good-humoured & pleasant", their numbers depleted by European settlement. FitzRoy investigated how the atolls of the
Cocos (Keeling) Islands had formed. The survey supported Darwin's theorising. Darwin's
Journal was eventually rewritten as a separate third volume, on geology and natural history. In
Cape Town, South Africa, Darwin and FitzRoy met John Herschel, who had recently written to Lyell praising his
uniformitarianism as opening bold speculation on "that mystery of mysteries, the replacement of extinct species by others" as "a natural in contradistinction to a miraculous process". When organising his notes as the ship sailed home, Darwin wrote that, if his growing suspicions about the mockingbirds, the tortoises and the
Falkland Islands fox were correct, "such facts undermine the stability of Species", then cautiously added "would" before "undermine". He later wrote that such facts "seemed to me to throw some light on the origin of species". Without Darwin's knowledge,
extracts from his letters to Henslow had been read to scientific societies, printed as a pamphlet for private distribution among members of the
Cambridge Philosophical Society, and reported in magazines, including
The Athenaeum. Darwin first heard of this at Cape Town, and at
Ascension Island read of Sedgwick's prediction that Darwin "will have a great name among the Naturalists of Europe".
Inception of Darwin's evolutionary theory . On 2 October 1836,
Beagle anchored at
Falmouth, Cornwall. Darwin promptly made the long coach journey to Shrewsbury to visit his home and see relatives. He then hurried to
Cambridge to see Henslow, who advised him on finding available naturalists to catalogue Darwin's animal collections and to take on the botanical specimens. Darwin's father organised investments, enabling his son to be a self-funded
gentleman scientist, and an excited Darwin went around the London institutions being fêted and seeking experts to describe the collections. British zoologists at the time had a huge backlog of work, due to the encouragement of natural history collecting throughout the British Empire, and there was a danger of specimens being left in storage. Charles Lyell eagerly met Darwin for the first time on 29 October and soon introduced him to the up-and-coming anatomist
Richard Owen, who had the facilities of the
Royal College of Surgeons to work on the fossil bones collected by Darwin. Owen's surprising results included other gigantic extinct
ground sloths as well as the
Megatherium Darwin had identified, a near complete skeleton of the unknown
Scelidotherium and a
hippopotamus-sized
rodent-like skull named
Toxodon resembling a giant
capybara. The armour fragments were actually from
Glyptodon, a huge armadillo-like creature, as Darwin had initially thought. These extinct creatures were related to living species in South America. In mid-December, Darwin took lodgings in Cambridge to arrange expert classification of his collections and prepare his own research for publication. Questions of how to combine his diary into the
Narrative were resolved at the end of the month when FitzRoy accepted
Broderip's advice to make it a separate volume, and Darwin began work on his
Journal and Remarks. Darwin's first paper showed that the South American landmass was slowly rising. With Lyell's enthusiastic backing, he read it to the
Geological Society of London on 4 January 1837. On the same day, he presented his mammal and bird specimens to the
Zoological Society. The ornithologist
John Gould soon announced that the Galápagos birds that Darwin had thought a mixture of
blackbirds, "
gros-beaks" and
finches, were, in fact, twelve
separate species of finches. On 17 February, Darwin was elected to the Council of the Geological Society, and Lyell's presidential address presented Owen's findings on Darwin's fossils, stressing the geographical continuity of species as supporting his uniformitarian ideas. . Early in March, Darwin moved to London to be near this work, joining Lyell's social circle of scientists and experts such as
Charles Babbage, who described God as a programmer of laws. Darwin stayed with his
freethinking brother Erasmus, part of this
Whig circle and a close friend of the writer
Harriet Martineau, who promoted the
Malthusianism that underpinned the controversial Whig
Poor Law reforms to stop welfare from causing overpopulation and more poverty. As a Unitarian, she welcomed the
radical implications of
transmutation of species, promoted by Grant and younger surgeons influenced by
Geoffroy. Transmutation was anathema to Anglicans defending social order, but reputable scientists openly discussed the subject. There was broad interest in John Herschel's letter praising Lyell's approach as a way to find a
natural cause of the origin of new species. The two rheas were distinct species, and on 14 March Darwin announced how their distribution changed going southwards. By mid-March 1837, barely six months after his return to England, Darwin was speculating in his
Red Notebook on the possibility that "one species does change into another" to explain the geographical distribution of living species such as the rheas, and extinct ones such as the strange extinct mammal
Macrauchenia, which resembled a giant
guanaco, a llama relative. Around mid-July, he recorded in his "B" notebook his thoughts on lifespan and variation across generationsexplaining the variations he had observed in
Galápagos tortoises, mockingbirds, and rheas. He sketched branching descent, and then a
genealogical branching of a single
evolutionary tree, in which "It is absurd to talk of one animal being higher than another", thereby discarding Lamarck's idea of independent
lineages progressing to higher forms.
Overwork and illness While developing this intensive study of transmutation, Darwin became mired in more work. Still rewriting his
Journal, he took on editing and publishing the expert reports on his collections, and with Henslow's help obtained a Treasury grant of £1,000 to sponsor this multi-volume
Zoology of the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle, a sum equivalent to about £115,000 in 2021. He stretched the funding to include his planned books on geology, and agreed to unrealistic dates with the publisher. As the
Victorian era began, Darwin pressed on with writing his
Journal, and in August 1837 began correcting
printer's proofs. As Darwin worked under pressure, his health suffered. On 20 September, he had "an uncomfortable
palpitation of the heart", so his doctors urged him to "knock off all work" and live in the country for a few weeks. After visiting Shrewsbury, he joined his Wedgwood relatives at
Maer Hall, Staffordshire, but found them too eager for tales of his travels to give him much rest. His charming, intelligent, and cultured cousin
Emma Wedgwood, nine months older than Darwin, was nursing his invalid aunt. His uncle Josiah pointed out an area of ground where cinders had disappeared under
loam. Darwin suggested that this might have been the work of
earthworms, inspiring "a new & important theory" on their role in
soil formation, which he presented at the Geological Society on 1 November 1837. His
Journal was printed and ready for publication by the end of February 1838, as was the first volume of the
Narrative, but FitzRoy was still working hard to finish his own volume. Despite the grind of writing and editing the
Beagle reports, Darwin made remarkable progress on transmutation, taking every opportunity to question expert naturalists and, unconventionally, people with practical experience in
selective breeding such as farmers and
pigeon fanciers. Over time, his research drew on information from his relatives and children, the family butler, neighbours, colonists, and former shipmates. He included mankind in his speculations from the outset, and on seeing an
orangutan in the zoo on 28 March 1838 noted its childlike behaviour. The strain took a toll, and by June, he was being laid up for days on end with stomach problems, headaches, and heart symptoms. For the rest of his life, he was repeatedly incapacitated with episodes of stomach pains, vomiting, severe
boils, palpitations, trembling, and other symptoms, particularly during times of stress, such as attending meetings or making social visits. The cause of
Darwin's illness remained unknown, and attempts at treatment had only ephemeral success. On 23 June, he took a break and went "geologising" in Scotland. He visited
Glen Roy in glorious weather to see the parallel "roads" cut into the hillsides at three heights. He later published his view that these were marine-raised beaches, but then had to accept that they were shorelines of a
proglacial lake. Fully recuperated, he returned to Shrewsbury in July 1838. Used to jotting down daily notes on animal breeding, he scrawled rambling thoughts about marriage, career, and prospects on two scraps of paper, one with columns headed "Marry" and "Not Marry". Advantages under "Marry" included "constant companion and a friend in old age ... better than a dog anyhow", against points such as "less money for books" and "terrible loss of time". Having decided in favour of marriage, he discussed it with his father, then went to visit his cousin Emma on 29 July. At this time, he did not get around to proposing, but against his father's advice, he mentioned his ideas on transmutation.
Malthus and natural selection Continuing his research in London, Darwin's wide reading now included the sixth edition of
Malthus's
An Essay on the Principle of Population. On 28 September 1838, he noted its assertion that human "population, when unchecked, goes on doubling itself every twenty-five years, or increases in a geometrical ratio", a
geometric progression so that population soon exceeds food supply in what is known as a
Malthusian catastrophe. Darwin was well-prepared to compare this to
Augustin de Candolle's "warring of the species" of plants and the struggle for existence among wildlife, explaining how the numbers of a species remained roughly stable. This would result in the formation of new species. As he later wrote in his
Autobiography: By mid-December, Darwin saw a similarity between farmers picking the best stock in selective breeding, and a Malthusian Nature selecting from chance variants so that "every part of newly acquired structure is fully practical and perfected", thinking this comparison "a beautiful part of my theory". He later called his theory
natural selection, an analogy with what he termed the "artificial selection" of selective breeding. While he was house-hunting in London, bouts of illness continued and Emma wrote urging him to get some rest, almost prophetically remarking "So don't be ill any more my dear Charley till I can be with you to nurse you." He found what they called "Macaw Cottage" (because of its gaudy interiors) in
Gower Street, then moved his "museum" in over Christmas. On 24 January 1839, Darwin was
elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS). On 29 January, Darwin and Emma Wedgwood were married at Maer in an Anglican ceremony arranged to suit the Unitarians, then immediately caught the train to London and their new home.
Geology books, barnacles, evolutionary research Darwin now had the framework of his theory of natural selection "by which to work", His research included extensive experimental selective breeding of plants and animals, finding evidence that species were not fixed and investigating many detailed ideas to refine and substantiate his theory. The impetus of Darwin's barnacle research came from a collection of a barnacle colony from Chile in 1835, which he dubbed
Mr. Arthrobalanus. His confusion over the relationship of this species (
Cryptophialus minutus) to other barnacles caused him to fixate on the systematics of the taxa. He wrote his first examination of the species in 1846, but did not formally describe it until 1854. FitzRoy's long-delayed
Narrative was published in May 1839. Darwin's
Journal and Remarks got good reviews as the third volume, and on 15 August, it was published on its own. Early in 1842, Darwin wrote about his ideas to Charles Lyell, who noted that his ally "denies seeing a beginning to each crop of species". Darwin's book
The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs on his theory of atoll formation was published in May 1842 after more than three years of work, and he then wrote his first "pencil sketch" of his theory of natural selection. To escape the pressures of London, the family moved to rural
Down House in Kent in September. On 11 January 1844, Darwin mentioned his theorising to the botanist
Joseph Dalton Hooker, writing with melodramatic humour "it is like confessing a murder". Hooker replied, "There may, in my opinion, have been a series of productions on different spots, & also a gradual change of species. I shall be delighted to hear how you think that this change may have taken place, as no presently conceived opinions satisfy me on the subject." in Kent was his usual "thinking path". By July, Darwin had expanded his "sketch" into a 230-page "Essay", to be expanded with his research results if he died prematurely. In November, the anonymously published sensational best-seller
Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation brought wide interest in transmutation. Darwin scorned its amateurish geology and zoology, but carefully reviewed his own arguments. Controversy erupted, and it continued to sell well despite contemptuous dismissal by scientists. Darwin completed his third geological book in 1846. He now renewed his interest in marine invertebrates and, using expertise from his student days with Grant, dissected and classified the barnacles he had collected on the voyage. He enjoyed observing their beauty and thought about comparisons with allied structures. In 1847, Hooker read the "Essay" and sent notes that provided Darwin with the calm critical feedback that he needed, but would not commit himself and questioned Darwin's opposition to continuing acts of
creation. In an attempt to improve his chronic ill health, Darwin went in 1849 to Dr.
James Gully's
Malvern spa and was surprised to find some benefit from
hydrotherapy. Then, in 1851, his treasured daughter
Annie fell ill, reawakening his fears that his illness might be hereditary. She died the same year after a long series of crises. In eight years of work on barnacles, Darwin's theory helped him to find "
homologies" showing that slightly changed body parts served different functions to meet new conditions. In some
genera he found minute males
parasitic on
hermaphrodites, showing an
intermediate stage in evolution of
distinct sexes. In 1853, it earned him the
Royal Society's Royal Medal, and it made his reputation as a
biologist. Upon the conclusion of his research, Darwin declared, "I hate a barnacle as no man ever did before." In 1854, he became a Fellow of the
Linnean Society of London, gaining postal access to its library. He began a major reassessment of his theory of species, and in November realised that divergence in the character of descendants could be explained by them becoming adapted to "diversified places in the economy of nature".
Publication of the theory of natural selection . He wrote to
Joseph Hooker about this portrait, "if I really have as bad an expression, as my photograph gives me, how I can have one single friend is surprising." By the start of 1856, Darwin was investigating whether eggs and
seeds could survive travel across seawater to spread species across oceans. Hooker increasingly doubted the traditional view that species were fixed, but their young friend
Thomas Henry Huxley was still firmly against the transmutation of species. Lyell was intrigued by Darwin's speculations without realising their extent. When he read a paper by
Alfred Russel Wallace, "On the Law which has Regulated the Introduction of New Species", he saw similarities with Darwin's thoughts. He urged him to publish to establish precedence. Though Darwin saw no threat, on 14 May 1856, he began writing a short paper. Finding answers to difficult questions held him up repeatedly, and he expanded his plans to a "big book on species" titled
Natural Selection, which was to include his "note on Man". He continued his research,
obtaining information and specimens from naturalists worldwide, including Wallace, who was working in
Borneo. Although Wallace had not asked for publication, Darwin suggested he would send it to any journal that Wallace chose. His family was in crisis, with children in the village dying of
scarlet fever, and he put matters in the hands of his friends. After some discussion, with no reliable way of involving Wallace, Lyell and Hooker decided on a joint presentation at the Linnean Society on 1 July of
On the Tendency of Species to form Varieties; and on the Perpetuation of Varieties and Species by Natural Means of Selection. On the evening of 28 June, Darwin's baby son died of scarlet fever after almost a week of severe illness, and he was too distraught to attend. There was little immediate attention to this announcement of the theory; the president of the Linnean Society remarked in May 1859 that the year had not been marked by any revolutionary discoveries. Only one review rankled enough for Darwin to recall it later; Professor
Samuel Haughton of Dublin claimed that "all that was new in them was false, and what was true was old". Darwin struggled for thirteen months to produce an abstract of his "big book", suffering from ill health but getting constant encouragement from his scientific friends. Lyell arranged to have it published by
John Murray.
On the Origin of Species proved unexpectedly popular, with the entire stock of 1,250 copies oversubscribed when it went on sale to booksellers on 22 November 1859. In the book, Darwin set out "one long argument" of detailed observations, inferences and consideration of anticipated objections. In making the case for common descent, he included evidence of homologies between humans and other mammals. Having outlined sexual selection, he hinted that it could explain differences between
human races. He avoided explicit discussion of human origins, but implied the significance of his work with the sentence; "Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history." His theory is simply stated in the introduction: At the end of the book, he concluded that: The last word was the only variant of "evolved" in the first five editions of the book. "
Evolutionism" at that time was associated with other concepts, most commonly with
embryological development. Darwin first used the word
evolution in
The Descent of Man in 1871, before adding it in 1872 to the 6th edition of
The Origin of Species.
Responses to publication The book aroused international interest, with less controversy than had greeted the popular and less scientific
Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. Though Darwin's illness kept him away from the public debates, he eagerly scrutinised the scientific response, commenting on press cuttings, reviews, articles, satires and caricatures, and corresponded on it with colleagues worldwide. The book did not explicitly discuss human origins, Upon reading it, Huxley remarked "How extremely stupid not to have thought of that!" The first review asked, "If a monkey has become a man – what may not a man become?" It said this should be left to theologians as being too dangerous for ordinary readers. Among early favourable responses, Huxley's reviews swiped at
Richard Owen, leader of the scientific establishment which Huxley was trying to overthrow. In April, Owen's review attacked Darwin's friends and condescendingly dismissed his ideas, angering Darwin, but Owen and others began to promote ideas of supernaturally guided evolution.
Patrick Matthew drew attention to his 1831 book, which had a brief appendix suggesting a concept of natural selection leading to new species, but he had not developed the idea. The
Church of England's response was mixed. Darwin's old Cambridge tutors Sedgwick and Henslow dismissed the ideas, but
liberal clergymen interpreted natural selection as an instrument of God's design, with the cleric
Charles Kingsley seeing it as "just as noble a conception of Deity". In 1860, the publication of
Essays and Reviews by seven liberal Anglican theologians diverted
clerical attention from Darwin. Its ideas, including
higher criticism, were attacked by church authorities as
heresy. In it,
Baden Powell argued that
miracles broke God's laws, so belief in them was
atheistic, and praised "Mr Darwin's masterly volume [supporting] the grand principle of the self-evolving powers of nature". Asa Gray discussed
teleology with Darwin, who imported and distributed Gray's pamphlet on
theistic evolution,
Natural Selection is not inconsistent with natural theology. The most famous confrontation was at the public
1860 Oxford evolution debate during a meeting of the
British Association for the Advancement of Science, where the
Bishop of Oxford Samuel Wilberforce, though not opposed to transmutation of species, argued against Darwin's explanation and human descent from apes. Joseph Hooker argued strongly for Darwin, and Thomas Huxley's legendary retort, that he would rather be descended from an ape than a man who misused his gifts, came to symbolise a triumph of science over religion. . In response to objections that the
origin of life was unexplained, Darwin pointed to acceptance of
Newton's law even though the cause of gravity was unknown. Despite criticisms and reservations related to this topic, he nevertheless proposed a prescient idea in an 1871 letter to Hooker in which he suggested the origin of life may have occurred in a "
warm little pond".
Darwinism became a movement covering a wide range of evolutionary ideas. In 1863, Lyell's
Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man popularised prehistory, though his caution on evolution disappointed Darwin. Weeks later, Huxley's ''
Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature showed that anatomically, humans are apes. Then, The Naturalist on the River Amazons'' by
Henry Walter Bates provided empirical evidence of natural selection. Following the publication of
The Origin of Species, both
Prince Albert, who supported Darwin's ideas, and the Prime Minister,
Lord Palmerston, recommended Darwin for a knighthood but without success; among the opponents of the proposed honour was Bishop Wilberforce. Later lobbying brought Darwin Britain's highest scientific honour, the Royal Society's
Copley Medal, awarded on 3 November 1864. That day, Huxley held the first meeting of what became the influential "
X Club" devoted to "science, pure and free, untrammelled by religious dogmas". By the end of the 1860s, most scientists agreed that evolution occurred, but only a minority supported Darwin's view that the chief mechanism was natural selection. The
Origin of Species was translated into many languages, becoming a staple scientific text attracting thoughtful attention from all walks of life, including the "working men" who flocked to Huxley's lectures. Darwin's theory resonated with various movements at the time and became a key fixture of popular culture. Cartoonists parodied animal ancestry in an old tradition of showing humans with animal traits, and in Britain, these droll images served to popularise Darwin's theory in an unthreatening way. Darwin had started growing a beard during illness in 1862. After he reappeared in public in 1866, caricatures of him as an
ape helped to identify all forms of evolutionism with Darwinism.
Othniel C. Marsh, America's first palaeontologist, was the first to provide solid fossil evidence to support Darwin's theory of evolution by unearthing the ancestors of the modern horse. In 1877, Marsh delivered a very influential speech before the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, providing a demonstrative argument for evolution. For the first time, Marsh traced the evolution of vertebrates from fish all the way through humans. Sparing no detail, he listed a wealth of fossil examples of past life forms. The significance of this speech was immediately recognized by the scientific community, and it was printed in its entirety in several scientific journals.
Descent of Man, sexual selection, and botany Despite repeated bouts of illness during the last twenty-two years of his life, Darwin's work continued. Having published
On the Origin of Species as an
abstract of his theory, he pressed on with experiments, research, and writing of his "
big book". He covered human descent from earlier animals, including the evolution of society and of mental abilities, as well as explaining decorative beauty in
wildlife and diversifying into innovative plant studies. Enquiries about insect
pollination led in 1861 to novel studies of wild
orchids, showing adaptation of their flowers to
attract specific moths to each species and ensure
cross-fertilisation. In 1862,
Fertilisation of Orchids gave his first detailed demonstration of the power of natural selection to explain complex ecological relationships, making testable predictions. Explorers in
Madagascar had discovered an orchid,
Angraecum sesquipedale, with a sixteen-inch-long nectary. Darwin predicted the existence of a moth with a proboscis long enough to pollinate it; the pollen "would not be withdrawn until some huge moth, with a wonderfully long proboscis, tried to drain the last drop." Explorers in Madagascar discovered
Xanthopan in 1903. As his health declined, he lay on his sickbed in a room filled with inventive experiments to trace the movements of
climbing plants. Admiring visitors included
Ernst Haeckel, a zealous proponent of Darwinism incorporating Lamarckism and
Goethe's idealism. Wallace remained supportive, though he increasingly turned to
Spiritualism. Darwin's book
The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication (1868) was the first part of his planned "big book", and included his unsuccessful hypothesis of
pangenesis attempting to explain
heredity. It sold briskly at first, despite its size, and was translated into many languages. He wrote most of a second part, on natural selection, but it remained unpublished in his lifetime. Lyell had already popularised human prehistory, and Huxley had shown that anatomically humans are apes. His research using images was expanded in his 1872 book
The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, one of the first books to feature printed photographs, which discussed the
evolution of human psychology and its continuity with the
behaviour of animals. Both books proved very popular, and Darwin was impressed by the general assent with which his views had been received, remarking that "everybody is talking about it without being shocked." His conclusion was "that man with all his noble qualities, with sympathy which feels for the most debased, with benevolence which extends not only to other men but to the humblest living creature, with his god-like intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar systemwith all these exalted powersMan still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin." His evolution-related experiments and investigations led to books on
Insectivorous Plants,
The Effects of Cross and Self Fertilisation in the Vegetable Kingdom, different forms of flowers on plants of the same species, and
The Power of Movement in Plants. He continued to collect information and exchange views from scientific correspondents all over the world, including
Mary Treat, whom he encouraged to persevere in her scientific work. He was the first person to recognise the significance of carnivory in plants. His botanical work was interpreted and popularised by various writers including
Grant Allen and
H. G. Wells, and helped transform plant science in the late 19th century and early 20th century.
Death and funeral and Charles Darwin in the nave of
Westminster Abbey, London In 1882, Darwin was diagnosed with what was called "
angina pectoris" which then meant
coronary thrombosis and disease of the heart. At the time of his death, the physicians diagnosed "anginal attacks" and "heart-failure"; there has since been scholarly speculation about his
life-long health issues. Darwin died at Down House on 19 April 1882, aged 73. His last words were to his family, telling Emma, "I am not the least afraid of deathRemember what a good wife you have been to meTell all my children to remember how good they have been to me". While she rested, he repeatedly told Henrietta and Francis, "It's almost worthwhile to be sick to be nursed by you". He had expected to be buried in St Mary's churchyard at
Downe, but at the request of Darwin's colleagues, after public and parliamentary petitioning,
William Spottiswoode (President of the Royal Society) arranged for Darwin to be honoured by
burial in Westminster Abbey, close to John Herschel and
Isaac Newton. The funeral, held on Wednesday, 26 April, was attended by thousands of people, including family, friends, scientists, philosophers, and dignitaries. ==Children==