Charles Darwin - a genius remembered

When Charles Darwin died in 1873 at the age of 64, the scientific world recognized that it had lost one of its greatest thinkers, and Darwin was buried among the illustrious in Britain's burial-place of honour, Westminster Abbey in London. Darwin, biologist, botanist, and geographer, was a scientist whose name is usually placed on a level with the men like Copernicus and Einstein, men whose perseverance and convictions led them to see great new truths, to understand whole new domains of existence.
   Yet Darwin did not invent: he did not even propose a totally new theory* : but by years of careful observation, painstaking study, and analogical deductions, he managed to formulate in a coherent and scientific fashion, a theory which rapidly gained credence as the correct, or basically correct explanation of the diversity of life on our earth.
    It was in November 1859 that Darwin published his fundamental work, The Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection.
   Charles Darwin was born into a family of thinkers. His father was a Fellow of the Royal Society (the elite circle of top British scientists), his mother was the daughter of Josiah Wedgwood, the man who founded the famous Wedgwood Potteries, and his grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, was a famous physician, radical thinker and philosopher who, like his grandson, spent much time studying the evolution of life.
   After a childhood in the town of Shrewsbury, where he was educated at the Grammar School, Darwin went up to Edinburgh University to study medecine and natural history. When he was eighteen, he left Edinburgh and went to Cambridge University, planning to enter the church: but he was more interested in science than in religion and in the end he abandoned theology.
  Shortly after graduating from Cambridge, he got a job as a naturalist on the ship H.M.S. Beagle, which was about to start on a scientific and cartographic survey of the South American coast. The journey started in December 1831 and was to last almost five years, during which time he amassed considerable documentation.
  Darwin was particularly struck by the fauna of the south seas, notably by the tortoises he found on the Galapagos Islands, a group of Pacific Islands where nature seemed different from nature in other lands. The Galapagos tortoises, Darwin observed, differed from island to island, and this, he deduced, implied different forms of evolution, since the animals obviously came from the same origins. Darwin was also struck by the iguanas he found, and observed that those which lived in water had heads suitable for finding food among stones, whilst those that lived on land had a sharper profile, more fit for a herbivorous animal.
   Darwin developed his theory of evolution, but it was not until 1859 that he actually published it. It was instantly seen as a great milestone in scientific thought, and precipitated violent argument all over Europe. Many found fault in it, and Darwin spent the rest of his life modifying aspects of his theory in the light of other people's observations. He also wrote a dozen or so other books on aspects of botany and biology, including his Descent of Man (1877). The debate has continued ever since; contested for a while in the Soviet Union, because of its anti-egalitarian implications, Darwinism, or Neo Darwinism (Darwinian theory modified by Mendelian genetic theory) is now accepted by almost every scientist.