Two men destined to change the world were born on 12 February 1809. Abraham Lincoln was born in a log cabin in Indiana, U.S.A. Under considerably more upgrade circumstances, Charles Robert Darwin was born on that same day in Shrewsbury, England. This year will also mark the 150th anniversary of the publication of Darwin’s seminal work, On the Origin of Species.
British legislators are saying that the great naturalist’s work should be marked by an annual national public holiday every 12th February in his honour.
Prior to Darwin’s field observations and research the Cuvarian catastrophic proposal was held to explain life past and present. Instead, Darwin showed that evolution is continuous, putting the discovery into rational form. As L. Sprague de Camp noted a half-century ago, “his theory of evolution by selection of the fittest has (with minor modifications) survived vicious attacks from the pious to triumph over all opposition.”
Both of Darwin’s grandfathers were distinguished Englishmen: Erasmus Darwin, was a physician and early theorist of evolution, while Josiah Wedgewood founded the famous pottery works. Father Robert Darwin, also a physician, hoping son Charles would follow the family tradition, sent him at age 16 to study medicine in Edinburgh. He hated it.
Father Darwin, despite being a religious skeptic, then hoped his son would instead enter the church. Accordingly, Charles spent the next three years at Cambridge that he claimed were also largely wasted. Nevertheless, he received a degree in January 1831.
University education often allows unusual associations. One such led the young Darwin to be appointed as an unpaid naturalist on H.M.S. Beagle, although would be able to sell any collections he made during the voyage which would last through until 1836, circumnavigating the globe.
The ship was under the command of Captain Robert Fitz Roy who only agreed on Darwin when he was assured he was a “gentleman.” They departed England 27 December 1831.
According to Mark Prigg, Science Correspondent of the Evening Standard, H.M.S. Beagle was a 90.3 ft-long Cherokee class 10-gun brig-sloop of the Royal Navy. She was launched on 11 May 1820 at Woolwich Dockyard at a cost of £7,803. The vessel lay unused for five years before being reassigned as a research vessel and sailing on three expeditions, the second of which carried Darwin. She was scrapped in 1870.
Aboard this small vessel with little workspace and even less privacy, Darwin travelled for the next five years. While HMS Beagle charted many shores and investigated natural phenomena, including visits to Tahiti and Australia, Darwin was frequently able step ashore. There he observed with an inquiring eye the local flora and fauna and their differences.
The most well known of these was his now famed studies of over a dozen species of finches on the Galapagos Islands in the Pacific Ocean about 650 miles west of Ecuador. Their plumage varies but so do the bird’s beaks to an extraordinary degree, depending on the source of food they seek out such as different insects and plant seeds. This led him to the notion that all these species must have descended from a single ancestor that reached the isolated islands by chance – in a word, evolution.
On the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birthday two myths persist about evolution and natural selection, explains Michael Shermer in Scientific American. The first myth is that natural selection is a description of a process, not a force. The second myth is the belief that bigger, stronger, faster and brutishly competitive will reproduce more successfully, but it is just as likely that the organisms that are smaller, weaker, slower and socially cooperative will do so as well, writes Shermer.
Science may produce “inspired guesses,” as L. Sprague de Camp observed, when the Greek Demokritos hit upon the theories of the atom and the evolution of life by just such deductions. While this was not to be recognized for over two thousand years, another such, the hypothesis of evolution was. By change, it was discovered at the same time by Darwin and another British naturalist Wallace. But while the latter had an inspired guess lying sick in the East Indies, it was Darwin’s patient plodding, assembling stacks of research that clinched the argument in 1859 with the publication of On the Origin of Species.
(For the research journal Nature’s coverage visit online at
nature.com/darwin.)
