Charles
Darwin Biography
in full Charles Robert Darwin
( 1809 – 1882 )
(born Feb. 12, 1809, Shrewsbury, Shropshire,
Eng.—died April 19, 1882,
Downe, Kent) British naturalist. The grandson of Erasmus Darwin and Josiah Wedgwood,
he studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh and biology at Cambridge.
He was recommended as a naturalist on HMS Beagle, which was bound on a long scientific
survey expedition to South America and the South Seas (1831–36). His zoological
and geological discoveries on the voyage resulted in numerous important publications
and formed the basis of his theories of evolution. Seeing competition between
individuals of a single species, he recognized that within a local population
the individual bird, for example, with the sharper beak might have a better chance
to survive and reproduce and that if such traits were passed on to new generations,
they would be predominant in future populations. He saw this natural selection
as the mechanism by which advantageous variations were passed on to later generations
and less advantageous traits gradually disappeared. He worked on his theory for
more than 20 years before publishing it in his famous On the Origin of Species
by Means of Natural Selection (1859). The book was immediately in great demand,
and Darwin's intensely controversial theory was accepted quickly in most scientific
circles; most opposition came from religious leaders. Though Darwin's ideas were
modified by later developments in genetics and molecular biology, his work remains
central to modern evolutionary theory. His many other important works included
Variation in Animals and Plants Under Domestication (1868) and The Descent of
Man… (1871). He was buried in Westminster Abbey. Darwinism.
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