Charles Darwin
1809–1882 2 entries
Biography
Charles Darwin was an English naturalist whose theory of evolution by natural selection changed the way we see life on Earth. Born in Shrewsbury in 1809, he began to study medicine in Edinburgh, could not bear the sight of surgery and moved to Cambridge to prepare for the Church, while spending his free time collecting beetles. In 1831 he sailed as a naturalist on HMS Beagle, on a voyage around the world of almost five years, during which the animals of the Galápagos Islands, among much else, set him thinking about how species change.
Back in England he worked on his theory for some twenty years, until a letter from the young naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, who had reached the same idea, led to their joint presentation in 1858. The following year he published On the Origin of Species, which sold out on its first day and stirred a debate that went far beyond science, and in 1871 The Descent of Man applied the theory to human beings. He spent the second half of his life, often ill, at Down House in Kent with his wife Emma and their children, working in his garden and greenhouse. He died in 1882 and was buried in Westminster Abbey, near Isaac Newton.
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