Darwin and Darwinism

Charles Robert Darwin was born in Shrewsbury, England on 12 February 1809. He was the fifth of six children of doctor Robert Darwin and Susannah Wedgwood. When he was 16 he began studying medicine but he renounced for lack of interest. Then his father sent him to the University of Cambridge to become an Anglican priest, but he didn’t want to become that. So he studied theology but also natural science. In 1831 he started a long journey of five years around the world as naturalist on the research ship “Beagle”. During this voyage he collected an enormous quantity of biological and geological observations. He found fossils of extinct animals that were similar to modern species, noticed many variations among plants and animals of the same general type. His more famous observations were on the Galapagos Islands, archipelago to the west of South America, where he noted 13 different types of mockingbirds and different tortoise’s shape from island to island. Darwin came home in 1836 and in 1839 he married his rich cousin Emma Wedgwood: they went to live in a country’s residence called down house and they had 10 children. Darwin didn’t have economical problems and so he continued his studies: in 1859 he published “On The Origin of Species”. Charles Darwin died in Downe, England on 19 April 1882 and then he was buried in Westminster Abbey close to Isaac Newton.

In 1836, after his return to London from the voyage on the Beagle, Darwin started to analyze his observations. He was influenced by Malthus’s essay “On the principle of the population”: food and other factors controls the population, only the strongest being could survive. Darwin was also influenced by Lamarck’s theory of evolutionism: each species derived from another species, and there was the inheritance of characters. So there should be a gradual and slow evolution of species and the primary mechanism for evolution was a process called natural selection. He published “The Origin of Species” in 1859 and after that Darwin continued to write on botany, geology, and zoology until his death. Darwin explained that individuals of the same species differ for genetic characteristics: the characteristics that lead individuals to have more favourable features in certain environmental conditions are favoured. When individuals with certain characteristics inherited survive and reproduce while others with different hereditary characters are eliminated, the population will slowly change. After a long period of time natural selection leads to an accumulation of changes that differentiate groups of organisms. The same Darwin knew that his theory would have difficulties to be accepted and he published his work after a long time because he wanted to gather as much evidence to confirm his theory and because he was afraid to put himself against the creationist thought of the Victorian society.

Reactions due to the spread of Darwinism were immediate. Some intellectuals made satire on the Darwin’s theories. Some biologists supported that Darwin was not able to demonstrate experimentally his theories, while others criticized him saying that he could not explain the origin of the changes, or how they are transmitted to succeeding generations. The Anglican church attacked violently Darwin because he said materialism and indirectly denied the creation in six days by God. Last year, 126 years after his death, Anglican church apologized with the great scientist.

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