Charles Darwin
Key Facts
- Voyage à bord du HMS Beagle (1831-1836) : observations aux Galápagos sur la variation des espèces
- Publie «De l'Origine des espèces» en 1859 : théorie de la sélection naturelle
- Publie «La Descendance de l'Homme» en 1871 : l'humain issu d'une évolution commune avec les grands singes
- Sa théorie provoque un débat mondial avec les institutions religieuses (débat Oxford, 1860)
- Inhumé à l'abbaye de Westminster aux côtés de Newton (1882)
- Son oeuvre fonde la biologie moderne : base de la génétique, de l'écologie et de la paléontologie
Biography
Charles Darwin was born on 12 February 1809 in Shrewsbury, Shropshire, into a prosperous family of free thinkers. His grandfather Erasmus Darwin had already sketched out evolutionary ideas. After studying medicine in Edinburgh — which he quickly abandoned, as operations without anaesthesia horrified him — he enrolled at Cambridge to prepare for the Anglican ministry. But it was above all his passion for geology, botany and insect collecting that flourished there, under the influence of botanist John Stevens Henslow, who advised him to sail as a naturalist aboard HMS Beagle.
The voyage of the Beagle (1831-1836) would change the course of science. Darwin circumnavigated the globe, observing the fauna and flora of South America, the Galápagos Islands, Australia and the Pacific. In the Galápagos, he noted that finches varied from island to island according to the food resources available. These observations, set against the fossils he was collecting, gradually led him to suspect that species were not fixed, but slowly transformed over generations.
Back in England, Darwin spent more than twenty years refining his theory, dreading the reaction of the scientific and religious establishment. He accumulated data on variation in domestic species, selective breeding, and the geology of coral reefs. In 1859, pressed by the imminent publication of a similar theory by Alfred Russel Wallace, he published "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection". This book, which sold out on the day of publication, explains that individuals best adapted to their environment survive and reproduce more, passing on their advantageous traits to their offspring.
The publication of "The Descent of Man" in 1871 pushed the demonstration further: human beings themselves were the product of a long evolution from common ancestors shared with the great apes. Religious opposition was fierce, symbolised by the famous Oxford Union debate in 1860 pitting Thomas Huxley, Darwin's champion, against Bishop Wilberforce. Yet the scientific community adopted evolutionary theory with remarkable speed, as evidence continued to accumulate.
Charles Darwin died on 19 April 1882 at Downe, in Kent. He was buried at Westminster Abbey, near Isaac Newton — a tribute from the British nation to one of its greatest minds. His work founded modern biology and remains, after more than a century and a half, the foundation upon which ecology, genetics, palaeontology and evolutionary medicine rest.