Author
Charles Darwin
1809-1882
English naturalist and geologist who set out the theory of evolution by natural selection in On the Origin of Species (1859), now the unifying theory of the life sciences.
Born Charles Robert Darwin.
Charles Darwin was born on 12 February 1809 in Shrewsbury, the fifth of six children of the wealthy doctor Robert Darwin and Susannah Wedgwood. Sent to study medicine at Edinburgh, he found the lectures dull and surgery distressing, and turned to natural history instead. His father then sent him to Cambridge to prepare for life as a country parson, where beetle collecting and his friendship with botanist John Stevens Henslow fed his passion for science.
In 1831 Henslow proposed him as naturalist on HMS Beagle, which was to chart the coast of South America. On the voyage, which lasted almost five years, he spent much of his time on land, studying geology and collecting specimens from Patagonia to the Galápagos Islands. Puzzled by what he had found, he arrived at his theory of natural selection in 1838. He married his cousin Emma Wedgwood in 1839, and from 1842 lived at Down House in Kent, working on through years of illness.
His journal of the voyage, published in 1839 and on this site as The Voyage of the Beagle, made him famous as a popular author. He was still writing up his theory in 1858 when Alfred Russel Wallace sent him an essay describing the same idea, and their papers were presented together. On the Origin of Species followed in 1859, and all 1,250 copies were oversubscribed when it went on sale.
By the 1870s most scientists and much of the educated public had accepted evolution. Darwin died at Down House on 19 April 1882 and was buried in Westminster Abbey.
Sources: wikipedia.org
