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Charles Robert Darwin was born in Shrewsbury, Shropshire, 02-12-1809, at his family's home, The Mount. Robert Darwin, his father, was a wealthy doctor.
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Between 1816-1817, Charles as a young boy around 7 was showing an inclination towards history and collecting.
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Robert Waring Darwin gave his own copy of the Clavis Anglica linguæ botanicæ (Berkenhout 1764) to his son in 1820 when Charles was 11. The signatures in this book have placed this book in the Rare Book Collection in the Cambridge University Library. During this time, Darwin’s older brother Erasmus made him his assistant and collaborator in the chemical laboratory they installed in the garden of The Mount. Erasmus wrote to Charles from Cambridge about scientific discoveries and experiments.
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Darwin spent the summer of 1825 as an apprentice doctor, helping his father treat the poor of Shropshire, before going to the University of Edinburgh Medical School. This was considered the best medical school around this time. He showed interest in taxidermy, history and zoology. He avoided most lectures outside these interests and found surgery distressing. It was from his cousin Fox he became an avid beetle collector. His botany professor and Fox convinced him to pursue geology.
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The opportunity to become a naturalist on a voyage of exploration arose from his botany teacher's recognition of Darwin's abilities. What was intended to be a 2 year voyage lasted 5 years. As the trip progressed, he became dedicated to the life of scientific inquiry. The first stirrings of doubt about the fixity of species came during his study of the Galapagos bird species. This would later become his theory of Natural selection.
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When Darwin returned to England in October 1836., the Beagle voyage gave rise to geolocial and zoological books and papers over the following years that testify to the wealth and quality of Darwin’s collections and observations. But more than this, the Beagle material was to provide Darwin with the basis for his life’s work, that Darwin became a committed transmutationist a few months after his return to England.
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The topic of his paper was on the gradual raising of South America over eons of time. He concluded that as land masses raise upward, the nearby ocean floor subsides, and that the animals on the raising continent somehow or another adapt to these very slow changes.
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The Royal Society is a Fellowship of many of the world's most eminent scientists and is the oldest scientific academy in continuous existence.Each candidate for Fellowship or Foreign Membership must be nominated by two Fellows of the Royal Society, who sign a certificate of proposal. The certificate includes a statement of the principal grounds on which the proposal is being made and is available for inspection by other Fellows.
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Corals were an important topic at this time as many ships were wrecked on unexpected reefs. As well as mapping the distribution of coral reefs, Darwin worked out why different reefs grew where they did, including directly next to land or separated by a stretch of water, like the Great Barrier Reef.
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Darwin's most famous work, and one of the most important ever written. It revolutionized our understanding of life on earth. Darwin brings together many convincing kinds of evidence and arguments to show that living things change over time and that they are related to one another genealogically. Link text
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Darwin was awarded the Royal Society's highest award, the Copley Medal. The Copley Medal is an award given by the Royal Society, for "outstanding achievements in research in any branch of science." This was awarded for his important researches in geology, zoology, and botanical physiology..
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In this work Darwin demonstrates that the difference between mankind and animals is not one of kind, but of degree. He also argues that sexual selection explains human racial differences.
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Isn't published until after his death in 1887.
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The University of Cambridge had come round to Darwinism, and on Saturday 17 November the family attended the Senate House for a ceremony in which Darwin was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Laws in front of crowds of students, who strung a cord across the chamber with a monkey-marionette which was removed by a Proctor then replaced by a "missing link", a beribboned ring which hung over the crowd through the ceremony.
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By the time of his death, in 1882, Darwin was considered the greatest scientist of his age. Even the church his theory had challenged accorded him a full state funeral and burial in Westminster Abbey, near the grave of Sir Isaac Newton.By the time of his death, his theory of evolution had gained general acceptance in Britain, even among many in the Anglican clergy.
