Charles Darwin

Charles Darwin

Charles Robert Darwin (12 February 1809 - 19 April 1883) was a famous naturalist born in England. He is best known for the theory of natural selection which has since been almost universally accepted by biologists as the major mechanism for evolution. The concept is that biological species develop over time via natural selection, branching from common origins. Outside of evolution in particular, he was regarded as an expert on barnacles, as well as being credited with discovering how coral atolls were formed.

Early Life

Charles Darwin was born in Shrewsbury, England in 1809 to his parents Dr. Robert Darwin and Susannah Wedgewood. Darwin's mother was very religious but his father was a freethinker and wasn't as constricted by the repressive religious beliefs that existed at that time. Despite his lack of religious belief, Darwin's old man allowed Charles to be baptized into the Anglican Church. Darwin's mother died when Charles was very young. After his mother died, Charles attended a nearby Anglican school in 1818. In 1825 he helped his father treating poor people in Shopshire and went on to study medicine at the University of Edinburgh. He was turned off by the brutality of surgery and neglected his medical studies. At the university he learned taxidermy from a free black slave named John Edmonstone. John also told the young Charles exciting tales about the South American Amazon and also about the brutalities of slavery. Because of this experience, Darwin went on to hate slavery.

Religious Beliefs

Charles Darwin in 1880 at the age of 71.

Charles Darwin was a Christian up and through his famous five year voyage on the HMS Beagle. But in the ensuing two years after returning to England (1836 to 1839; and in his late twenties) Darwin abandoned Christianity (1) and had become an agnostic (2). About twenty years later in 1859 (at the age of fifty) Darwin published his famous book The Origin of Species. "In order not to hurt the feelings of his friends and wife, Darwin often used deistic language in his publications" (3). According to Darwin the "manifestly false history of the world" (4) as recorded in the Old Testament and New Testament miracles led him to reject Biblical veracity (5). Eminent Darwin biographer, Professor Janet Browne, sums up Darwin's views concerning religion: Darwin "mapped out a comparative evolution of the religious sense, proposing that religious belief was ultimately nothing more than a primitive urge to bestow a cause on otherwise inexplicable natural events...In short, he made no secret of his view that he did not believe religion to have any rational foundation at all" (6). When he died in 1882 at the age of seventy-three, Darwin was buried at Westminster Abbey next to Sir Isaac Newton.

Though Darwin wrote of religion as a tribal survival strategy, he still believed that God was the ultimate lawgiver. His belief dwindled, and with the death of his daughter Annie in 1851, Darwin finally lost all faith in Christianity. He continued to help the local church with parish work, but on Sundays would go for a walk while his family attended church. He now thought it better to look at pain and suffering as the result of general laws rather than direct intervention by God. When asked about his religious views, he wrote that he had never been an atheist in the sense of denying the existence of a God, and that generally "an Agnostic would be the more correct description of my state of mind."

It is interesting that both of Darwin's grandfathers (the physician and poet Erasmus Darwin, and the pottery manufacturer Josiah Wedgwood) were members of the Lunar Society, a private club devoted to science, philosophy, and free thinking based in Birmingham, England, which was largely responsible for starting the industrial revolution, and also numbered amongst its members the American scientist and politician Benjamin Franklin.

There is a false rumor that on his deathbed Darwin recanted his theory. This is a myth supposedly started by Sir James Hope's widow. Darwin's daughter, Henrietta, said that, "Darwin never recanted any of his scientific views, either then [on his deathbed] or earlier.

References

1. Mayr, Ernst Growth of Biological Thought (1982:402).
2. Mayr, Ernst One Long Argument (1991:75).
3. Ibid. (1991:75).
4. Barlow, Nora (editor) The Autobiography of Charles Darin (1958:85).
5. Ibid. (1958:85-87).
6. Browne, Janet Charles Darwin The Power of Place (2002:341)
7. Kevles, B., Females of the Species: Sex and Survival in the Animal Kingdom, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, p. 8, 1986.