Copyright © 1999 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Charles Darwin (1809-1882) formulated the most important biological theory of the last century and a half: his theory of EVOLUTION by natural selection. By explaining that "mystery of mysteries," the origin of species, Darwin overturned long-entrenched biological and religious assumptions. He applied his general theory to the human animal and thereby rendered an account of moral behavior and rational mind that has formed the foundation for many complementary theories today.
Charles Darwin was born on February 12, 1809, the son of Robert Waring Darwin, a Shrewsbury physician, and Susannah Wedgwood Darwin, daughter of Josiah Wedgwood, who founded the famous pottery firm. When he was sixteen, Darwin went to Edinburgh medical school, following in the shadows of his famous grandfather Erasmus Darwin, and of his father and older brother. At Edinburgh, he came into contact with Robert Grant, who helped him cultivate the study of invertebrates and introduced him to the evolutionary works of his own grandfather and of Lamarck. After Darwin left Edinburgh without a degree, his father, greatly disappointed, sent him to Cambridge to become a country parson. He spent most of his time at university in the pursuits of a gentleman, with some added beetle collecting. A teacher and friend, John Henslow, nevertheless detected a spark in the young man and recommended him to serve as naturalist on a vessel that would sail around the world charting the seas for British naval and commercial craft.
Under the command of the twenty-six-year-old Robert FitzRoy, H.M.S. Beagle sailed from Falmouth Harbor on December 29, 1831, and reached the coast of South America two months later. While on board, Darwin occupied himself with reading Alexander von Humboldt's Personal Narrative of Travels and steering clear of FitzRoy's foul moods. The Beagle charted the waters along the east and west coasts of South America, the Pacific islands, and Australia. Darwin traveled into the interior of these lands to record geological information, as well as to collect fossils and animal specimens to be shipped back to London for careful description and cataloguing. The ship docked at Falmouth on October 4, 1836, almost five years after it had departed. During the voyage Darwin seems not to have seriously considered the possibility that species had transmuted, though he may have had some suspicions. Only in March 1837, as he tried to make sense of the morphology of mockingbirds collected on the Galápagos Islands, did his biological orthodoxy begin to crumble.
During the spring and summer of 1837, Darwin became gradually committed to the idea that species had been transformed over time, and he started to develop hypotheses concerning the causes of change. Initially he supposed that the direct impact of the environment and inherited habit had altered species' forms -- notions he retained in his later theorizing. He thought that innate behavior, instincts, also underwent transformations through time, being first acquired as habits. On September 28, 1838, Darwin read Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population, which allowed him to formulate, in the words of his Autobiography, "a theory by which to work," his theory of natural selection.
Darwin did not wish to exempt human beings from the evolutionary process. During the late 1830s and early 1840s, he devised theories of the evolution of mind and conscience. Influenced by the empiricism of David HUME and his grandfather, Darwin regarded intelligence as a generalizing and loosening of the cerebral structures that underlay instinct. Human reason, he believed, gradually emerged out of instincts, which themselves derived from inherited habits and selection operating on such habits. From late 1838 to early 1840, in a set of notebooks ("M" and "N") and in loose notes, he worked out a theory of conscience, which would be elaborated thirty years later in the Descent of Man (1871).
Darwin continued to work on his basic theory of evolution through the 1840s and into the early 1850s, simultaneously undertaking the time-consuming labor that produced four large volumes on barnacles. In 1856, after prodding by his friend the eminent geologist Charles Lyell, Darwin began to compose a volume that would detail his theory. In mid-June 1858, he received from Alfred Russel Wallace, then in Malaya, a letter describing a theory of species origin that was nearly identical to his own. Darwin thought his originality had now vanished under a veil of honor. It took Lyell and other of Darwin's friends to convince him that he should continue working on his book, which he did, though in abbreviated form. On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection was published in November 1859 and sold out within a few weeks. During Darwin's lifetime, the Origin went through six editions, each incorporating alterations and responses to critics. With the last edition, the book had changed by some 50 percent.
The Origin had barely mentioned humankind. Critics, however, immediately understood the theory's implications, and most of their objections focused on the problem of human evolution. In 1870, when Wallace seemed to have excluded human beings from the natural process of species change, Darwin felt compelled to reveal his full conception. The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, appearing in 1871, made his theories of the evolution of mind and conscience quite explicit. Mind reached its human form under the aegis of natural selection and language, the latter producing heritable modifications in brain patterns. Darwin argued that human moral instincts would be acquired through community selection, inasmuch as self-sacrificing behavior would do the agent little good but would benefit the clan, which would include many relatives of the agent. In competition among clans, those whose members exercised more altruistic instincts would have the advantage; and so moral conscience would gradually increase in humankind. Because the pricks of such conscience would little directly benefit the moral individual, Darwin thought his theory quite different from those that were based in utilitarian selfishness -- the philosophical ground for many comparable theories today in SOCIOBIOLOGY. Darwin had intended to discuss thoroughly the EMOTIONS in the Descent, but saved his theories of emotional instinct for his Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872). Though Konrad Lorenz regarded this book as the foundational document for ETHOLOGY, Darwin had explained emotional instincts solely through the inheritance of acquired habit. And so the Darwinian shade that yet hovers over current biology does bear but passing resemblance to the man who lived in the last century.
Darwin, C. (1969). The Autobiography of Charles Darwin., N. Barlow, Ed., New York: Norton.
Darwin, C. (1987). Charles Darwin's Notebooks, 1836-1844. P. Barrett et al., Eds., Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Darwin, C. (1985 -). The Correspondence of Charles Darwin. 9 vols. to date. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Darwin, C. (1871). The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex. 2 vols. London: Murray.
Darwin, C. (1872). The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. London: Murray.
Darwin, C. (1839). Journal of Researches into the Geology and Natural History of the Various Countries Visited by H.M.S. Beagle. London: Henry Coburn.
Darwin, C. (1854). A Monograph of the Fossil Balanidae and Verrucidae of Great Britain. London: Palaeontological Society.
Darwin, C. (1851). A Monograph of the Fossil Lepadidae or, Pedunculated Cirripedes of Great Britain. London: Ray Society.
Darwin, C. (1851). A Monograph of the Sub-Class Cirripedia. The Balanidae (or Sessile Cirripedes), the Verrucidae, &c. London: Ray Society.
Darwin, C. (1851). A Monograph of the Sub-Class Cirripedia, with Figures of all the Species. The Lepadidae or, Pedunculated Cirripedes. London: Ray Society.
Darwin, C. (1859). On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. London: Murray.
Humboldt, A., and A. Bonpland. (1818-1829). Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent, during the Years 1799 - 1804. 7 vols. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown.
Malthus, T. (1826). An Essay on the Principle of Population. 6th ed., 2 vols. London: Murray.
Further Reading Bowler, P. (1984). Evolution: The History of an Idea. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Browne, J. (1995). Charles Darwin: Voyaging. New York: Alfred Knopf.
Dennett, D. (1995). Darwin's Dangerous Idea. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Desmond, A. (1989). The Politics of Evolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Glass, B., Ed. (1968). Forerunners of Darwin. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Hull, D. (1973). Darwin and His Critics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Kohn, D., Ed. (1985). The Darwinian Heritage. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Mayr, E. (1991). One Long Argument: Charles Darwin and the Genesis of Modern Evolutionary Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Ospovat, D. (1981). The Development of Darwin's Theory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Richards, R. (1987). Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Ruse, M. (1996). Monad to Man: The Concept of Progress in Evolutionary Biology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Copyright © 1999 Massachusetts Institute of Technology