| Name | Erasmus Darwin |
|---|---|
| Caption | Erasmus Darwin c.1792-3. |
| Birth date | December 12, 1731 |
| Birth place | Elston Hall, Elston, Nottinghamshire near Newark-on-Trent |
| Death date | April 18, 1802 |
| Death place | Breadsall, Derby |
| Resting place | All Saints Church, Breadsall |
| Residence | Lichfield |
Erasmus Darwin (12 December 1731 – 18 April 1802) was an English physician who turned down George III's invitation to be a physician to the King. One of the key thinkers of the Midlands Enlightenment, he was also a natural philosopher, physiologist, abolitionist, inventor and poet. His poems included much natural history, including a statement of evolution and the relatedness of all forms of life. He was a member of the Darwin–Wedgwood family, which includes his grandsons Charles Darwin and Francis Galton. Darwin was also a founding member of the Lunar Society of Birmingham, a discussion group of pioneering industrialists and natural philosophers.
Erasmus Darwin House, his home in Lichfield, is now a museum dedicated to Erasmus Darwin and his life's work.
Born at Elston Hall, Nottinghamshire near Newark-on-Trent, England, the youngest of seven children of Robert Darwin of Elston (12 August 1682–20 November 1754), a lawyer, and his wife Elizabeth Hill (1702–1797). The nameErasmus had been used by a number of his family and derives from his ancester Erasmus Earle, Common Sergent of England under Oliver Cromwell Meets her fond husband with averted eye: Four beardless youths the obdurate beauty move With soft attentions of Platonic love.
Darwin's final long poem, The Temple of Nature, was published posthumously in 1803. The poem was originally titled The Origin of Society. It is considered his best poetic work. It centres on his own conception of evolution. The poem traces the progression of life from micro-organisms to civilized society.
His poetry was admired by Wordsworth, although Coleridge was intensely critical, writing, "I absolutely nauseate Darwin's poem".Mark with bright curves the printless steps of Time;Near and more near your beamy cars approach,And lessening orbs on lessening orbs encroach; —Flowers of the sky! ye too to age must yield,Frail as your silken sisters of the field!Star after star from Heaven's high arch shall rush,Suns sink on suns, and systems systems crush,Headlong, extinct, to one dark center fall,And Death and Night and Chaos mingle all!— Till o'er the wreck, emerging from the storm,Immortal Nature lifts her changeful form,Mounts from her funeral pyre on wings of flame,And soars and shines, another and the same.
Category:Proto-evolutionary biologists Category:People of the Industrial Revolution Category:English botanists Category:English entomologists Category:Members of the Lunar Society Category:Fellows of the Royal Society Category:Darwin-Wedgwood family Category:People from Lichfield Category:People from Nottinghamshire Category:1731 births Category:1802 deaths Category:Alumni of St John's College, Cambridge Category:Alumni of the University of Edinburgh
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| Name | Kurt Vonnegut |
|---|---|
| Imagesize | 170x256 |
| Caption | Vonnegut speaking in 2004 |
| Birthname | Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. |
| Birthdate | November 11, 1922 |
| Birthplace | Indianapolis, Indiana, United States |
| Deathdate | April 11, 2007 |
| Deathplace | New York City, United States |
| Occupation | Novelist, essayist |
| Nationality | American |
| Period | 1949–2005 |
| Genre | SatireBlack comedyScience fiction |
| Influences | Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Joseph Heller, William March, Mark Twain, George Orwell, Eugene V. Debs, Powers Hapgood, George Bernard Shaw, James Thurber, James Joyce |
| Influenced | Douglas Adams, On Mothers' Day in 1944, his mother committed suicide with sleeping pills. While a prisoner, he witnessed the fire bombing of Dresden in February 1945 which destroyed most of the city. |
| Name | Vonnegut, Kurt, Jr. |
| Short description | Novelist, Essayist |
| Date of birth | November 11, 1922 |
| Place of birth | Indianapolis, Indiana, United States |
| Date of death | April 11, 2007 |
| Place of death | Manhattan, New York, United States |
This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
| Name | Peter Greenaway, CBE |
|---|---|
| Caption | Peter Greenaway, August 2007 |
| Birth date | April 05, 1942 |
| Birth place | Newport, Wales, UK |
| Occupation | Film director, writer, painter |
The visual hallmark of Greenaway's cinema is the heavy influence of Renaissance painting, and Flemish painting in particular, notably in scenic composition and illumination and the concomitant contrasts of costume and nudity, nature and architecture, furniture and people, sexual pleasure and painful death. His most familiar musical collaborator is composer Michael Nyman, who has scored several of Greenaway's films.
In 1980, Greenaway delivered The Falls (his first feature-length film) – a mammoth, fantastical, absurdist encyclopedia of flight-associated material all relating to ninety-two victims of what is referred to as the Violent Unknown Event (VUE). In the 1980s, Greenaway's cinema flowered in his best-known films, The Draughtsman's Contract (1982), A Zed & Two Noughts (1985), The Belly of an Architect (1987), Drowning by Numbers (1988), and his most successful (and controversial) film, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989).
In 1989, he collaborated with artist Tom Phillips on a television serial A TV Dante, dramatising the first few cantos of Dante's Inferno. In the 1990s, he presented the visually spectacular Prospero's Books (1991), the controversial The Baby of Mâcon (1993), The Pillow Book (1996), and 8½ Women (1999).
In the early 1990s, Greenaway wrote ten opera libretti known as the Death of a Composer series, dealing with the commonalities of the deaths of ten composers from Anton Webern to John Lennon, however, the other composers are fictitious, and one is a character from The Falls. In 1995, Louis Andriessen completed the sixth libretto, Rosa – A Horse Drama.
He also contributed to Visions of Europe, a short film collection by different European Union directors; his British entry is The European Showerbath. Nightwatching, a film on Rembrandt was released in 2007. Nightwatching is the first feature in the series "Dutch Masters", with the next project titled as "Goltzius and the Pelican Company".
On 17 June 2005, Greenaway appeared for his first VJ performance during an art club evening in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, with music by DJ Serge Dodwell (aka Radar), as a backdrop, ‘VJ’ Greenaway used for his set a special system consisting of a large plasma screen with laser controlled touchscreen to project the ninety-two Tulse Luper stories on the twelve screens of "Club 11", mixing the images live. This was later reprised at the Optronica festival, London.
On 12 October 2007 he created the multimedia installation Peopling the Palaces at the Royal Palace of Venaria that will remain open for 3 year and that animate the Palace with 100 videoprojectors.
by Paolo Veronese (mid-16th century)]] Greenaway exhibited his digital exploration of The Wedding at Cana by Paolo Veronese as part of the 2009 Venice Biennial. An arts writer for the New York Times called it "possibly the best unmanned art history lecture you'll ever experience," while acknowledging that some viewers might respond to it as "mediocre art, Disneyfied kitsch or a flamboyant denigration of site-specific video installation." The 50-minute presentation, set to a soundtrack, incorporates closeup images of faces from the painting along with animated diagrams revealing compositional relations among the figures. These images are projected onto and around the replica of the painting that now stands at the original site, within the Palladian architecture of the Benedictine refectory on San Giorgio Maggiore. The soundtrack features music and imagined dialogue scripted by Greenaway for the 126 "wedding guests, servants, onlookers and wedding crashers" depicted in the painting, consisting of small talk and banal chatter that culminates in reaction to the miraculous transformation of water to wine, according to the Gospels the first miracle performed by Jesus. Picasso's Guernica, Seurat's Grande Jatte, works by Jackson Pollock and Claude Monet, Velázquez's Las Meninas and Michelangelo's The Last Judgment are possible series subjects.
Category:1942 births Category:Commanders of the Order of the British Empire Category:English experimental filmmakers Category:English film directors Category:English painters Category:English screenwriters Category:Experimental film festivals Category:Experimental filmmakers Category:Golden Calf winners Category:Living people Category:Old Foresters Category:People from Newport Category:Welsh film directors
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| Name | Francis Galton |
|---|---|
| Birth date | February 16, 1822 |
| Birth place | Birmingham, England |
| Death date | January 17, 1911 |
| Death place | Haslemere, Surrey, England |
| Residence | England |
| Nationality | English |
| Field | Anthropology and polymathy |
| Work institution | Meteorological CouncilRoyal Geographical Society |
| Alma mater | King's College LondonCambridge University |
| Doctoral advisor | William Hopkins |
| Doctoral students | Karl Pearson |
| Known for | EugenicsThe Galton boardRegression toward the meanStandard deviationWeather map |
| Prizes | Linnean Society of London's Darwin–Wallace Medal in 1908.Copley medal (1910) |
Galton had a prolific intellect, and produced over 340 papers and books throughout his lifetime. He also created the statistical concept of correlation and widely promoted regression toward the mean. He was the first to apply statistical methods to the study of human differences and inheritance of intelligence, and introduced the use of questionnaires and surveys for collecting data on human communities, which he needed for genealogical and biographical works and for his anthropometric studies.
He was a pioneer in eugenics, coining the term itself and the phrase "nature versus nurture". His book, Hereditary Genius (1869), was the first social scientific attempt to study genius and greatness. As an investigator of the human mind, he founded psychometrics (the science of measuring mental faculties) and differential psychology. He devised a method for classifying fingerprints that proved useful in forensic science.
As the initiator of scientific meteorology, he devised the first weather map, proposed a theory of anticyclones, and was the first to establish a complete record of short-term climatic phenomena on a European scale. He also invented the Galton Whistle for testing differential hearing ability.
Both families boasted Fellows of the Royal Society and members who loved to invent in their spare time. Both Erasmus Darwin and Samuel Galton were founder members of the famous Lunar Society of Birmingham, whose members included Boulton, Watt, Wedgwood, Priestley, Edgeworth, and other distinguished scientists and industrialists. Likewise, both families were known for their literary talent: Erasmus Darwin composed lengthy technical treatises in verse, and Aunt Mary Anne Galton wrote on aesthetics and religion, and her notable autobiography detailed the unique environment of her childhood populated by Lunar Society members.
, 1840]]
Galton was by many accounts a child prodigy — he was reading by the age of 2, at age 5 he knew some Greek, Latin and long division, and by the age of six he had moved on to adult books, including Shakespeare for pleasure, and poetry, which he quoted at length . Later in life, Galton would propose a connection between genius and insanity based on his own experience. He stated, “Men who leave their mark on the world are very often those who, being gifted and full of nervous power, are at the same time haunted and driven by a dominant idea, and are therefore within a measurable distance of insanity”
Galton attended King Edward's School, Birmingham, but chafed at the narrow classical curriculum and left at 16. His parents pressed him to enter the medical profession, and he studied for two years at Birmingham General Hospital and King's College, London Medical School. He followed this up with mathematical studies at Trinity College, University of Cambridge, from 1840 to early 1844.
A severe nervous breakdown altered Galton's original intention to try for honours. He elected instead to take a "poll" (pass) B.A. degree, like his half-cousin Charles Darwin . (Following the Cambridge custom, he was awarded an M.A. without further study, in 1847). He then briefly resumed his medical studies. The death of his father in 1844 left him financially independent but emotionally destitute, and he terminated his medical studies entirely, turning to foreign travel, sport and technical invention.
In his early years Galton was an enthusiastic traveller, and made a noteable solo trip through Eastern Europe to Constantinople, before going up to Cambridge. In 1845 and 1846 he went to Egypt and travelled down the Nile to Khartoum in the Sudan, and from there to Beirut, Damascus and down the Jordan.
In 1850 he joined the Royal Geographical Society, and over the next two years mounted a long and difficult expedition into then little-known South West Africa (now Namibia). He wrote a successful book on his experience, "Narrative of an Explorer in Tropical South Africa". He was awarded the Royal Geographical Society's gold medal in 1853 and the Silver Medal of the French Geographical Society for his pioneering cartographic survey of the region . This established his reputation as a geographer and explorer. He proceeded to write the best-selling The Art of Travel, a handbook of practical advice for the Victorian on the move, which went through many editions and is still in print.
In January 1853 Galton met Louisa Jane Butler (1822–1897) at his neighbour home and they were married on 1 August 1853. The union of 43 years proved childless.
He became very active in the British Association for the Advancement of Science, presenting many papers on a wide variety of topics at its meetings from 1858 to 1899 . He was the general secretary from 1863 to 1867, president of the Geographical section in 1867 and 1872, and president of the Anthropological Section in 1877 and 1885. He was active on the council of the Royal Geographical Society for over forty years, in various committees of the Royal Society, and on the Meteorological Council.
During this time, Galton wrote a controversial letter to the Times titled 'Africa for the Chinese', where he argued that the Chinese, as a race capable of high civilization and (in his opinion) only temporarily stunted by the recent failures of Chinese dynasties, should be encouraged to immigrate to Africa and displace the supposedly inferior aboriginal blacks.
Galton devoted much of the rest of his life to exploring variation in human populations and its implications, at which Darwin had only hinted. In doing so, he eventually established a research programme which embraced many aspects of human variation, from mental characteristics to height, from facial images to fingerprint patterns. This required inventing novel measures of traits, devising large-scale collection of data using those measures, and in the end, the discovery of new statistical techniques for describing and understanding the data.
Galton was interested at first in the question of whether human ability was hereditary, and proposed to count the number of the relatives of various degrees of eminent men. If the qualities were hereditary, he reasoned, there should be more eminent men among the relatives than among the general population. He obtained his data from various biographical sources and compared the results that he tabulated in various ways. This pioneering work was described in detail in his book in 1869. He showed, among other things, that the numbers of eminent relatives dropped off when going from the first degree to the second degree relatives, and from the second degree to the third. He took this as evidence of the inheritance of abilities. He also proposed adoption studies, including trans-racial adoption studies, to separate the effects of heredity and environment.
The method used in Hereditary Genius has been described as the first example of historiometry. To bolster these results, and to attempt to make a distinction between 'nature' and 'nurture' (he was the first to apply this phrase to the topic), he devised a questionnaire that he sent out to 190 Fellows of the Royal Society. He tabulated characteristics of their families, such as birth order and the occupation and race of their parents. He attempted to discover whether their interest in science was 'innate' or due to the encouragements of others. The studies were published as a book, English men of science: their nature and nurture, in 1874. In the end, it promoted the nature versus nurture question, though it did not settle it, and provided some fascinating data on the sociology of scientists of the time.
Galton recognized the limitations of his methods in these two works, and believed the question could be better studied by comparisons of twins. His method was to see if twins who were similar at birth diverged in dissimilar environments, and whether twins dissimilar at birth converged when reared in similar environments. He again used the method of questionnaires to gather various sorts of data, which were tabulated and described in a paper The history of twins in 1875. In so doing he anticipated the modern field of behavior genetics, which relies heavily on twin studies. He concluded that the evidence favored nature rather than nurture.
Galton invented the term eugenics in 1883 and set down many of his observations and conclusions in a book, Inquiries into human faculty and its development. He believed that a scheme of 'marks' for family merit should be defined, and early marriage between families of high rank be encouraged by provision of monetary incentives. He pointed out some of the tendencies in British society, such as the late marriages of eminent people, and the paucity of their children, which he thought were dysgenic. He advocated encouraging eugenic marriages by supplying able couples with incentives to have children.
Galton's study of human abilities ultimately led to the foundation of differential psychology and the formulation of the first mental tests.
Galton also devised a technique called composite photography, described in detail in Inquiries in human faculty and its development, which he believed could be used to identify types by appearance. He hoped his technique would aid medical diagnosis, and even criminology through the identification of typical criminal faces. However, he was forced to conclude after exhaustive experimentation that such types were not attainable in practice.
Darwin challenged the validity of Galton's experiment, giving his reasons in an article published in Nature where he wrote:
"Now, in the chapter on Pangenesis in my Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication I have not said one word about the blood, or about any fluid proper to any circulating system. It is, indeed, obvious that the presence of gemmules in the blood can form no necessary part of my hypothesis; for I refer in illustration of it to the lowest animals, such as the Protozoa, which do not possess blood or any vessels; and I refer to plants in which the fluid, when present in the vessels, cannot be considered as true blood." He goes on to admit: "Nevertheless, when I first heard of Mr. Galton's experiments, I did not sufficiently reflect on the subject, and saw not the difficulty of believing in the presence of gemmules in the blood."
Galton explicitly rejected the idea of the inheritance of acquired characteristics (Lamarckism), and was an early proponent of "hard heredity" through selection alone. He came close to rediscovering Mendel's particulate theory of inheritance, but was prevented from making the final breakthrough in this regard because of his focus on continuous, rather than discrete, traits (now known as polygenic traits). He went on to found the Biometric approach to the study of heredity, distinguished by its use of statistical techniques to study continuous traits and population-scale aspects of heredity.
This approach was later taken up enthusiastically by Karl Pearson and W.F.R. Weldon; together, they founded the highly influential journal Biometrika in 1901. (R.A. Fisher would later show how the biometrical approach could be reconciled with the Mendelian approach.) The statistical techniques that Galton invented (correlation, regression — see below) and phenomena he established (regression to the mean) formed the basis of the biometric approach and are now essential tools in all the social sciences.
Galton invented the use of the regression line , and was the first to describe and explain the common phenomenon of regression toward the mean, which he first observed in his experiments on the size of the seeds of successive generations of sweet peas. In the 1870s and 1880s he was a pioneer in the use of normal distribution to fit histograms of actual tabulated data. He invented the Quincunx, a pachinko-like device, also known as the bean machine, as a tool for demonstrating the law of error and the normal distribution . He also discovered the properties of the bivariate normal distribution and its relationship to regression analysis.
In 1906 Galton visited a livestock fair and stumbled upon an intriguing contest. An ox was on display, and the villagers were invited to guess the animal's weight after it was slaughtered and dressed. Nearly 800 gave it a go and, not surprisingly, not one hit the exact mark: 1,198 pounds. Astonishingly, however, the mean of those 800 guesses came close — very close indeed. It was 1,197 pounds.
After examining forearm and height measurements, Galton introduced the concept of correlation in 1888 . Correlation is the term used by Aristotle in his studies of animal classification, and later and most notably by Cuvier in Histoire des progrès des sciences naturelles depuis 1789 jusqu'à ce jour (5 volumes, 1826–1836). Correlation originated in the study of correspondence as described in the study of morphology. See R.S. Russell, Form and Function. Galton's later statistical study of the probability of extinction of surnames led to the concept of Galton–Watson stochastic processes .
He also developed early theories of ranges of sound and hearing, and collected large quantities of anthropometric data from the public through his popular and long-running Anthropometric Laboratory. It was not until 1985 that these data were analyzed in their entirety.
The method of identifying criminals by their fingerprints had been introduced in the 1860s by Sir William James Herschel in India, and their potential use in forensic work was first proposed by Dr Henry Faulds in 1880, but Galton was the first to place the study on a scientific footing, which assisted its acceptance by the courts . Galton pointed out that there were specific types of fingerprint patterns. He described and classified them into eight broad categories. 1: plain arch, 2: tented arch, 3: simple loop, 4: central pocket loop, 5: double loop, 6: lateral pocket loop, 7: plain whorl, and 8: accidental.
Galton was knighted in 1909. His statistical heir Karl Pearson, first holder of the Galton Chair of Eugenics at University College London, wrote a three-volume biography of Galton, in four parts, after his death . The eminent psychometrician Lewis Terman estimated that his childhood I.Q. was on the order of 200, based on the fact that he consistently performed mentally at roughly twice his chronological age . (This follows the original definition of IQ as mental age divided by chronological age, rather than the modern distribution-deviate definition.)
The flowering plant genus Galtonia was named in his honour.
Category:19th-century English people Category:English anthropologists Category:English eugenicists Category:English explorers Category:English geographers Category:English inventors Category:English meteorologists Category:English statisticians Category:Evolutionary biologists Category:Psychometricians Category:Anthropometry Category:Psychometrics Category:Anticyclones Category:Explorers of Africa Category:Fellows of the Royal Society Category:Fellows of the Royal Geographical Society Category:Old Edwardians (Birmingham) Category:Alumni of King's College London Category:Alumni of Trinity College, Cambridge Category:Darwin-Wedgwood family Category:People from Birmingham, West Midlands Category:Knights Bachelor Category:1822 births Category:1911 deaths Category:Intelligence researchers Category:Recipients of the Copley Medal Category:Scientists in stochastics Category:Probability theorists Category:Royal Medal winners Category:Gentleman scientists
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| Name | Sir Charles Lyell, Bt |
|---|---|
| Caption | Sir Charles Lyell |
| Birth place | Kinnordy, Forfarshire, Scotland |
| Death date | February 22, 1875 |
| Death place | Harley Street, London, England |
| Nationality | British |
| Field | Geology |
| Known for | Uniformitarianism |
| Author abbrev bot | |author_abbrev_zoo = |
| Influences | James Hutton & John Playfair; Lamarck; William Buckland |
| Influenced | Charles Darwin, Alfred Russel Wallace, Thomas Henry Huxley, Roderick Impey Murchison |
| Prizes | Copley Medal |
Sir Charles Lyell, 1st Baronet, Kt FRS (14 November 1797 – 22 February 1875) was a British lawyer and the foremost geologist of his day. He is best known as the author of Principles of Geology, which popularised James Hutton's concepts of uniformitarianism – the idea that the earth was shaped by slow-moving forces still in operation today. Lyell was a close and influential friend of Charles Darwin.
The house/place of his birth is located in the north-west of the Central Lowlands in the valley of the Highland Boundary Fault, one of the great features of Scottish geology. Round the house, in the rift valley, is farmland, but within a short distance to the north-west, on the other side of the fault, are the Grampian Mountains in the Highlands. His first paper, "On a recent formation of freshwater limestone in Forfarshire", was presented in 1822. By 1827, he had abandoned law and embarked on a geological career that would result in fame and the general acceptance of uniformitarianism, a working out of the idea proposed by James Hutton a few decades earlier.
In 1832, Lyell married Mary Horner of Bonn, daughter of Leonard Horner (1785–1864), also associated with the Geological Society of London. The new couple spent their honeymoon in Switzerland and Italy on a geological tour of the area. He was, along with the earlier John Playfair, the major advocate of James Hutton's idea of uniformitarianism, that the earth was shaped entirely by slow-moving forces still in operation today, acting over a very long period of time. This was in contrast to catastrophism, a geologic idea of abrupt changes, which had been adapted in England to support belief in Noah's flood. The two terms, uniformitarianism and catastrophism, were both coined by William Whewell; Lyell's work on volcanoes focused largely on Vesuvius and Etna, both of which he had earlier studied. His conclusions supported gradual building of volcanoes, so-called "backed up-building", as opposed to the upheaval argument supported by other geologists.
Places named after Lyell:
Category:1797 births Category:1875 deaths Category:People from Angus Category:Anglo-Scots Lyell, Charles, 1st Baronet Category:British geologists Category:British lawyers Category:British travel writers Category:Fellows of the Royal Society Category:Recipients of the Copley Medal Category:Alumni of Exeter College, Oxford Category:Academics of King's College London Category:Burials at Westminster Abbey Category:Knights Bachelor Category:Presidents of the Geological Society of London Category:Wollaston Medal winners Category:Royal Medal winners Category:Members of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences Category:19th-century scientists
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| Name | Charles Robert Darwin |
|---|---|
| Alt | Three quarter length studio photo showing Darwin's characteristic large forehead and bushy eyebrows with deep set eyes, pug nose and mouth set in a determined look. He is bald on top, with dark hair and long side whiskers but no beard or moustache. His jacket is dark, with very wide lapels, and his trousers are a light check pattern. His shirt has an upright wing collar, and his cravat is tucked into his waistcoat which is a light fine checked pattern. |
| Caption | Charles Robert Darwin, aged 45 in 1854, by then working towards publication of . |
| Birth date | February 12, 1809 |
| Birth place | Mount House, Shrewsbury, Shropshire, England |
| Death date | April 19, 1882 |
| Death place | Down House, Downe, Kent, England |
| Residence | England |
| Citizenship | British |
| Nationality | British |
| Ethnicity | English |
| Fields | Naturalist |
| Workplaces | Geological Society of London |
| Alma mater | University of EdinburghUniversity of Cambridge |
| Doctoral advisor | |
| Academic advisors | John Stevens HenslowAdam Sedgwick |
| Doctoral students | |
| Known for | The Voyage of the BeagleOn The Origin of SpeciesNatural selection |
| Influences | Alexander von HumboldtJohn HerschelCharles Lyell |
| Influenced | Joseph Dalton HookerThomas Henry HuxleyGeorge John RomanesErnst Haeckel |
| Awards | Royal Medal (1853)Wollaston Medal (1859)Copley Medal (1864) |
| Signature | Charles Darwin Signature.svg |
| Signature alt | "Charles Darwin", with the surname underlined by a downward curve that mimics the curve of the initial "C" |
Charles Robert Darwin FRS (12 February 1809 – 19 April 1882) was an English naturalist. He established that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestry, and proposed the scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called natural selection.
He published his theory with compelling evidence for evolution in his 1859 book On the Origin of Species. In 1871, he examined human evolution and sexual selection in The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, followed by The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. His research on plants was published in a series of books, and in his final book, he examined earthworms and their effect on soil.
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 with his brother Erasmus in October 1825. He found lectures dull and surgery distressing, so neglected his studies. He learned taxidermy from John Edmonstone, a freed black slave who had accompanied Charles Waterton in the South American rainforest, and often sat with this "very pleasant and intelligent man". After a week with student friends at Barmouth, he returned home to find a letter from Henslow proposing Darwin as a suitable (if unfinished) gentleman naturalist for a self-funded place with captain Robert FitzRoy, more as a companion than a mere collector, on which was to leave in four weeks on an expedition to chart the coastline of South America. FitzRoy began writing the official Narrative of the Beagle voyages, and after reading Darwin's diary he proposed incorporating it into the account. He later wrote that such facts "seemed to me to throw some light on the origin of species". These extinct creatures were related to living species in South America.
Early in March, Darwin moved to London to be near this work, joining Lyell's social circle of scientists and experts such as Charles Babbage,Darwin's Journal () backdated from August 1838 gives a date of 6 March 1837 who described God as a programmer of laws. Darwin stayed with his freethinking brother Erasmus, part of this Whig circle and close friend of writer Harriet Martineau who promoted Malthusianism underlying the controversial Whig Poor Law reforms to stop welfare from causing overpopulation and more poverty. As a Unitarian she welcomed the radical implications of transmutation of species, promoted by Grant and younger surgeons influenced by Geoffroy. Transmutation was anathema to Anglicans defending social order,
Gould met Darwin and told him that the Galápagos mockingbirds from different islands were separate species, not just varieties, and what Darwin had thought was a "wren" was also in the finch group. Darwin had not labelled the finches by island, but from the notes of others on the Beagle, including FitzRoy, he allocated species to islands.
.]] By mid-March, Darwin was speculating in his Red Notebook on the possibility that "one species does change into another" to explain the geographical distribution of living species such as the rheas, and extinct ones such as the strange Macrauchenia which resembled a giant guanaco. His thoughts on lifespan, asexual reproduction and sexual reproduction developed in his "B" notebook around mid-July on to variation in offspring "to adapt & alter the race to changing world" explaining the Galápagos tortoises, mockingbirds and rheas. He sketched branching descent, then a genealogical branching of a single evolutionary tree, in which "It is absurd to talk of one animal being higher than another", discarding Lamarck's independent lineages progressing to higher forms.
William Whewell pushed Darwin to take on the duties of Secretary of the Geological Society. After initially declining the work, he accepted the post in March 1838.
On 23 June he took a break and went "geologising" in Scotland. He visited Glen Roy in glorious weather to see the parallel "roads" cut into the hillsides at three heights. He later published his view that these were marine raised beaches, but then had to accept that they were shorelines of a proglacial lake.
Fully recuperated, he returned to Shrewsbury in July. Used to jotting down daily notes on animal breeding, he scrawled rambling thoughts about career and prospects on two scraps of paper, one with columns headed "Marry" and "Not Marry". Advantages included "constant companion and a friend in old age ... better than a dog anyhow", against points such as "less money for books" and "terrible loss of time." Darwin was well prepared to see at once that this also applied to de Candolle's "warring of the species" of plants and the struggle for existence among wildlife, explaining how numbers of a species kept roughly stable. As species always breed beyond available resources, favourable variations would make organisms better at surviving and passing the variations on to their offspring, while unfavourable variations would be lost. This would result in the formation of new species. On 28 September 1838 he noted this insight, describing it as a kind of wedging, forcing adapted structures into gaps in the economy of nature as weaker structures were thrust out. By mid December he saw a similarity between farmers picking the best breeding stock and a Malthusian Nature selecting from chance variants so that "every part of newly acquired structure is fully practical and perfected", For fifteen years this work was in the background to his main occupation of writing on geology and publishing expert reports on the Beagle collections. To escape the pressures of London, the family moved to rural Down House in September.]] The book aroused international interest, with less controversy than had greeted the popular Vestiges of Creation. Amongst early favourable responses, Huxley's reviews swiped at Richard Owen, leader of the scientific establishment Huxley was trying to overthrow. aiming to overturn the dominance of clergymen and aristocratic amateurs under Owen in favour of a new generation of professional scientists. Owen's claim that brain anatomy proved humans to be a separate biological order from apes was shown to be false by Huxley in a long running dispute parodied by Kingsley as the "Great Hippocampus Question", and discredited Owen. Darwin's theory also resonated with various movements at the time and became a key fixture of popular culture. Cartoonists parodied animal ancestry in an old tradition of showing humans with animal traits, and in Britain these droll images served to popularise Darwin's theory in an unthreatening way. While ill in 1862 Darwin began growing a beard, and when he reappeared in public in 1866 caricatures of him as an ape helped to identify all forms of evolutionism with Darwinism. With The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex published in 1871, Darwin set out evidence from numerous sources that humans are animals, showing continuity of physical and mental attributes, and presented sexual selection to explain impractical animal features such as the peacock's plumage as well as human evolution of culture, differences between sexes, and physical and cultural racial characteristics, while emphasising that humans are all one species. His research using images was expanded in his 1872 book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, one of the first books to feature printed photographs, which discussed the evolution of human psychology and its continuity with the behaviour of animals. Both books proved very popular, and Darwin was impressed by the general assent with which his views had been received, remarking that "everybody is talking about it without being shocked." His conclusion was "that man with all his noble qualities, with sympathy which feels for the most debased, with benevolence which extends not only to other men but to the humblest living creature, with his god-like intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system–with all these exalted powers–Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin."
Darwin was perceived as a national hero who had changed thinking, and scientists now accepted evolution as descent with modification, but few agreed with him that "natural selection has been the main but not the exclusive means of modification".
By his return he was critical of the Bible as history, and wondered why all religions should not be equally valid. In the next few years, while intensively speculating on geology and transmutation of species, he gave much thought to religion and openly discussed this with Emma, whose beliefs also came from intensive study and questioning. The theodicy of Paley and Thomas Malthus vindicated evils such as starvation as a result of a benevolent creator's laws which had an overall good effect. To Darwin, natural selection produced the good of adaptation but removed the need for design, He still viewed organisms as perfectly adapted, and On the Origin of Species reflects theological views. Though he thought of religion as a tribal survival strategy, Darwin still believed that God was the ultimate lawgiver. He considered it "absurd to doubt that a man might be an ardent theist and an evolutionist"
The "Lady Hope Story", published in 1915, claimed that Darwin had reverted back to Christianity on his sickbed. The claims were repudiated by Darwin's children and have been dismissed as false by historians. His last words were to his family, telling Emma "I am not the least afraid of death – Remember what a good wife you have been to me – Tell all my children to remember how good they have been to me", then while she rested, he repeatedly told Henrietta and Francis "It's almost worth while to be sick to be nursed by you".
Galton named the field of study "eugenics" in 1883, after Darwin's death, and developed biometrics. Eugenics movements were widespread at a time when Darwin's natural selection was eclipsed by Mendelian genetics, and in some countries compulsory sterilisation laws were imposed, the most famous of which were in Nazi Germany. It has been largely abandoned throughout the world.
During Darwin's lifetime, many geographical features were given his name. An expanse of water adjoining the Beagle Channel was named Darwin Sound by Robert FitzRoy after Darwin's prompt action, along with two or three of the men, saved them from being marooned on a nearby shore when a collapsing glacier caused a large wave that would have swept away their boats,()
VI. Darwin did not share the then common view that other races are inferior, and said of his taxidermy tutor John Edmonstone, a freed black slave, "I used often to sit with him, for he was a very pleasant and intelligent man".
Early in the Beagle voyage he nearly lost his position on the ship when he criticised FitzRoy's defence and praise of slavery. He wrote home about "how steadily the general feeling, as shown at elections, has been rising against Slavery. What a proud thing for England if she is the first European nation which utterly abolishes it! I was told before leaving England that after living in slave countries all my opinions would be altered; the only alteration I am aware of is forming a much higher estimate of the negro character." Regarding Fuegians, he "could not have believed how wide was the difference between savage and civilized man: it is greater than between a wild and domesticated animal, inasmuch as in man there is a greater power of improvement", but he knew and liked civilised Fuegians like Jemmy Button: "It seems yet wonderful to me, when I think over all his many good qualities, that he should have been of the same race, and doubtless partaken of the same character, with the miserable, degraded savages whom we first met here."
In the Descent of Man he mentioned the Fuegians and Edmonstone when arguing against "ranking the so-called races of man as distinct species".
He rejected the ill-treatment of native people, and for example wrote of massacres of Patagonian men, women, and children, "Every one here is fully convinced that this is the most just war, because it is against barbarians. Who would believe in this age that such atrocities could be committed in a Christian civilized country?"
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![57. Darwins Degree was in Theology . Charles Lyell was a Lawyer .[DVD 7, 2hr46:10 -2hr47:35]](http://web.archive.org./web/20110327000712im_/http://i.ytimg.com/vi/RzqRwj_5CD8/0.jpg "57. Darwins Degree was in Theology . Charles Lyell was a Lawyer .[DVD 7, 2hr46:10 -2hr47:35]")
