Charles Darwin

Charles Darwin proposed natural selection as the mechanism of evolution and supplied the evidence that made it persuasive, unifying biology around common descent. Born in Shrewsbury in 1809 into a wealthy medical family, he abandoned medicine at Edinburgh after finding surgery unbearable and was sent to Cambridge to prepare for the clergy, where botany and geology took him over instead. In December 1831 he sailed as a gentleman companion and naturalist aboard HMS Beagle on a five-year survey voyage. He read Charles Lyell's geology en route and came to think in terms of slow cumulative change; he found marine fossils high in the Andes and experienced a Chilean earthquake that visibly raised the coast. The Galápagos mockingbirds and finches, sorted by island after his return by the ornithologist John Gould, showed related species diverging in isolation. He worked out the theory by 1838, after reading Malthus on population supplied the idea of competitive pressure, and then did not publish for twenty years — writing an eight-year monograph on barnacles instead, aware of what the argument would cost. In 1858 Alfred Russel Wallace sent him a paper containing the same idea, and their work was read jointly to the Linnean Society that July. On the Origin of Species appeared in November 1859 and sold out immediately. The Descent of Man in 1871 applied the argument to humans and to sexual selection. He lacked any theory of inheritance — Mendel's work was unknown to him — which left a real gap that the modern synthesis closed only in the 1930s. He was an active abolitionist, and his later writing was used to justify racial hierarchies he did not endorse. He was buried in Westminster Abbey in 1882.

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