Charles Darwin is the father of modern biology and the man who killed God. This article about Charles Darwin obviously belongs in this blog.

Charles Darwin: Father of Modern Biology

Charles Darwin’s father once told his son, "You will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family," because Darwin, an apathetic student, seemed only interested in dogs, hunting, and catching rats. But at 22, when he had the opportunity to join an expedition on the ship Beagle, Darwin’s life changed. One result of that trip was On the Origin of Species, a landmark book published in 1859 that described the theory of evolution. It was a revolutionary idea, maintaining that each species of every plant and animal gradually evolves from common ancestors and, over time, develops traits that help it respond to environmental pressures and enables it to survive. Modern scientists consider this theory one of the most important scientific advances in history.

Darwin was born February 12, 1809, in England, to a prominent physician named Robert Darwin. His mother died when Darwin, the fifth of six children, was only eight. His father, now the central figure in his life, was dismayed that his son was not interested in school, preferring long, solitary walks observing nature and collecting insects, leaves, and rocks.

Later, Darwin attended medical school at Edinburgh University to please his father. But young Darwin was aghast at the barbarity of the surgery performed there and thought the lectures were "intolerably dull," so his grades suffered. Disappointed again by his son’s academic indifference, Dr. Darwin enrolled his son at Cambridge University, hoping he would become a clergyman. But at Cambridge, Darwin serendipitously met the most important mentor of his life and chose another path.

In the early nineteenth century, collecting beetles became a craze. College students competed to see who could find a new species of beetle, and young men went on nature walks hoping to best their fellow collectors by finding rare specimens. Darwin needed some expert advice to beat his rival, Charles "Beetles" Babington, so he went to John Stevens Henslow, a professor of botany. Thus began a relationship between the two men that lasted a lifetime. It was Henslow who encouraged Darwin to join the Beagle expedition even though Darwin’s father was against it, calling the trip "a wild scheme." So on December 27, 1831, Charles Darwin set out on a five-year, round-the-world sea voyage.

Although he suffered from acute seasickness in the beginning, the trip was just what Darwin needed, and he explored and collected specimens wherever the ship anchored. Most of the trip was spent mapping the South American coastline; although he didn’t know it at the time, the five-week stopover in the Galápagos Islands, off the coast of Ecuador, would prove to be a pivotal moment in his scientific thinking. There, Darwin collected, dissected, preserved, and labeled specimens from all branches of zoology and made notes on their environment, appearance, and even their stomach contents. When he returned to England in 1836, Darwin carried with him about 3,000 pages of notes and about 5,000 specimens.

Soon Darwin began to ask himself questions about what he had found in South America. Why, for example, did members of one species isolated on an island have different characteristics from a similar species on the continent or on another island? As was popular at the time, Darwin joined scholarly groups such as the Zoological Society and the Geological Society of London. As a member, Darwin frequently attended lectures and presented papers to enthusiastic audiences. In addition, societies were meeting places where he could discuss his scientific findings and, more importantly, his many questions.

To Darwin, it seemed the most important piece of the evolutionary puzzle concerned the bird species he had collected on the Galápagos Islands. Birds that Darwin thought were grosbeaks, wrens, and orioles were in fact 13 different species of the same kind of bird—a finch. These finches had various types of beaks: some were short and stubby while others were long and pointy. Other beak types ranged between these two extremes. Darwin observed that the type of beak seemed to vary according to the type of food available where the finches lived.

Darwin’s theory of evolution started taking shape after he began considering these differences, and he even drew a sketch of an evolutionary tree in his notebook. Basically, the theory states that of the offspring produced by a species, only those suited to find food, mates, and nesting places in their environment will survive to genetically pass on their traits to the next generation. In an environment where the only food is hard seeds, only birds with beaks that can crush such seeds are likely to survive. Evolution takes place as traits are passed down through each generation; eventually, members of one species will gradually change until a new species develops. Darwin called this process "evolution through natural selection."

In 1838, Darwin began to write out his ideas, but lacking confidence in his own credentials as a scientist, did not publish them. Darwin worried about how his church and his family would react to his new theory, which challenged religious beliefs in divine creation. His wife, Emma, the mother of his ten children, was a devout Christian. Darwin eventually put snippets of his theory into a book, The Voyage of the Beagle, published in 1839, and in l844, he outlined his theory in a manuscript he later circulated among a few friends.

At the same time, Darwin worked to develop his scientific expertise, publishing on various topics in natural history and corresponding with scientists such as botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker, geologist Charles Lyell, and Alfred Russel Wallace, a young, self-educated biologist like himself. When Darwin learned in 1858 that Wallace was planning to publish his own paper on natural selection, he realized that (after working far longer on the concept than Wallace) he was about to lose the glory of being the first to announce the theory. So Charles Lyell suggested the two men jointly present papers on natural selection in July 1858 at a meeting of the Linnean Society, a natural history society. But the papers created little excitement.

When Darwin published On the Origin of Species the next year, however, the book proved to be unexpectedly popular. But a storm of criticism arose too, as Darwin had feared. Some of his friends and colleagues defended him and his theory, but others bitterly attacked him. In 1871, his book The Descent of Man claimed that people were just another species of animal and that humans and apes evolved from a common ancestor. Cartoons of Darwin with a long beard and an ape body suddenly appeared in the press, but Darwin stood by his scientific findings; worrying about public opinion never seemed to be part of his temperament.

Darwin is considered the father of modern biology because he recognized the common evolutionary thread that all living things share. His work included 19 books and many scholarly papers, which spanned subjects as diverse as barnacles, coral, the relationship between plants and their pollinators, and the role of earthworms in creating mold. Darwin attributed his achievements to his "methodical habits" and his "complex and diversified mental qualities." He wrote, "Of these the most important have been—the love of science—unbounded patience . . . and a fair share of invention and commonsense."

He died April 19, 1882, and was buried at Westminster Abbey close to Sir Isaac Newton, the man who discovered gravity. Darwin’s father would finally have been proud.