Darwin publishes On the Origin of Species

The story

The voyage of the Beagle

Charles Darwin was born in 1809 in Shrewsbury, in England, into a well-off family: his grandfather and his father were doctors. Even as a boy, instead of studying, he preferred to collect insects, shells and minerals. His father sent him to study medicine at Edinburgh, but he could not bear the sight of blood, so he moved to Cambridge to become a clergyman. There, though, he became passionate about natural history, thanks to a professor of botany, John Henslow.

In 1831, aged twenty-two, Darwin had a unique opportunity: the British navy was looking for a young naturalist to accompany Captain Robert FitzRoy on a voyage around the world aboard the ship Beagle, to draw maps of coastlines. The voyage, planned to last two years, lasted almost five, from December 1831 to October 1836. Darwin suffered from seasickness, but he spent much of the time on land, in South America, collecting plants, animals, rocks and fossils.

In Patagonia he found the bones of gigantic extinct animals, similar to sloths and armadillos but much bigger than the living ones. In the Andes he found sea shells at enormous heights: the Earth changes, he thought, very slowly. On the Galápagos Islands, in the Pacific, he noticed that the giant tortoises, the mockingbirds and the small finches differed from island to island: different beaks and bodies, suited to the food of each place. Why?

An idea grows

Back in England, Darwin thought about it for years. At that time many people believed that each species had been created just as it is and never changed. Others, such as the Frenchman Lamarck, thought that living things did change, but did not explain well how. Darwin began to take notes, to carry out experiments, and to write to naturalists all over the world and to breeders of pigeons and dogs, to understand how domestic animals change.

In 1838 he read a book by the economist Thomas Malthus, which explained that population tends to grow faster than resources, so many individuals do not survive. It occurred to him: if in nature many more individuals are born than can live, those with characteristics better suited to the environment are more likely to survive and have offspring, and to pass those characteristics on. He called this mechanism “natural selection”.

For twenty years Darwin kept the idea almost secret, gathering evidence and studying, among other things, small crustaceans called barnacles for eight years. He was a shy, cautious man, and he feared controversy, partly because his wife Emma was very religious. But in June 1858 he received a letter from a young naturalist, Alfred Russel Wallace, who was working in Indonesia: Wallace had come up, independently, with the same idea. Darwin's friends arranged a joint presentation of the two works, in July 1858.

24 November 1859

Darwin made up his mind to write a book quickly and, on 24 November 1859, “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection” came out. All the available copies of the first edition (about 1,250) were ordered by booksellers before it even came out. The idea is simple. The individuals of a species are not all the same: they vary. Many of these differences are inherited from parents. In every generation more individuals are born than can survive, so there is competition. Those with more useful characteristics, for example skin better suited to the cold or a beak better suited to seeds, are more likely to survive and reproduce. So, over the generations, those characteristics become more common, and little by little, over very long periods of time, new species appear.

The book did not say much about humans, but everyone understood that the idea applied to us too. In 1871 Darwin published “The Descent of Man”, arguing that humans share common ancestors with the apes.

Controversy and agreement

The reception was mixed. Many scientists, such as Thomas Huxley, defended him with great energy: Huxley was called “Darwin's bulldog”. In June 1860, in Oxford, a famous debate set Bishop Samuel Wilberforce against Huxley. Others, especially among the clergy, opposed him, because he seemed to contradict the story in Genesis. In fact many believers, even then, thought that evolution and faith could go together.

Darwin, ill for much of his life, died in 1882 and was buried in Westminster Abbey, in London, near Isaac Newton.