Charles Darwin

About this Mind

Charles Darwin was born in Shrewsbury in 1809 into a wealthy family of doctors and potters. He abandoned medicine at Edinburgh, then studied at Cambridge, where the botanist John Stevens Henslow recommended him for an unpaid place on HMS Beagle. The voyage (1831-1836) took him around South America, to the Galápagos Islands and around the world, and he later called it the most important event in his life. Back in England he became convinced that species change, and in the autumn of 1838, after reading Malthus on population, arrived at the idea of natural selection. He developed it slowly, through notebooks, a long essay in 1844 and years of other work, until Alfred Russel Wallace's 1858 essay led to a joint presentation at the Linnean Society and, in 1859, to the Origin. Chronically ill for most of his adult life, he worked from Down House in Kent with his wife Emma and their children, ran experiments in his garden and greenhouse, and corresponded with naturalists around the world. He described himself late in life as an agnostic, and he died at Down in 1882.