Happy birthday, Mr. Charles Darwin! You would be 213 tomorrow, February 12, 2022. That would be a lot of candles on a very large cake, and take quite a set of lungs to blow them out.
Darwin Day asks people to “reflect and act on the principles of intellectual bravery, perpetual curiosity, scientific thinking, and hunger for truth as embodied in Charles Darwin.” While there is no shortage of articles about Darwin, here is a succinct history of the early years and the trip that got him thinking about evolution.
Darwin was born in 1809, the fifth of six children in a wealthy English family. Darwin already had science in his family blood so to speak, as his grandfathers were both naturalists. Darwin’s father was a doctor and wanted his son to go into the practice as well at Edinburgh University, but Darwin found it boring and repulsive. Instead, Darwin studied bird taxidermy under John Edmonstone, a freed South American slave who taught taxidermy at Edinburgh University. The two had many a conversation and historians believe Edmonstone was hugely influential on Darwin. Edmonstone was an overlooked individual in the sciences, almost lost to history.
Edinburgh was an intellectually-rich environment for young Darwin, and he became excited by a professor’s suggestion of a voyage upon the HMS Beagle to South America. Darwin went as a self-financed companion to the young aristocratic captain who was scared of being alone on such a long journey. Darwin also had the role of being the ship’s naturalist. But what may come as a surprise to some, this was not a trip with scientific purposes. It was for surveying the use of lands for British trade and returning Christianized “savages,” with the obvious intent to convert others to the religion and ease resistance against the colonizers.
As can be expected from a five-year ship journey, it was rife with hardship and fascination for Darwin. Illness plagued him, but his mind was piqued by new lands and observations of the natural world as he had never seen it. His beliefs were consistently challenged, both by the natural world as well as human behavior. He found that parasitism examples served as evidence against the beneficent design of nature, and the genocide of indigenous populations in South America would also challenge his understanding of human “civility.” His thinking about human behavior was largely influenced by his Victorian Christian upbringing which saw God as creator of a hierarchy of human races, with people described by words like “civilized” and “savages.” At the time, this was a belief system that he was starting to question, and one that his findings would continue to challenge.
Also bringing more questions were his fossil discoveries that revealed animals that were no longer in existence. The earth’s geological history as evident in his various land expeditions expanded his thinking into how earth time was made of periods of very VERY long time.
The journey would lead him to the Galapagos Islands, which, contrary to legend, was not the “eureka” moment. None-the-less, Darwin noted differences between the mockingbirds that existed on the islands, and continued to collect specimens of many animals and plants. (We house one of these plant specimens in the Billy L. Turner Plant Resources Center.)
This noted difference of mockingbirds would be one of the many observations that he would ponder after his return home.
When the voyage was over, Darwin had produced a 770-page diary, 1750 pages of notes, 12 catalogues of animal parts, and collected countless specimens. He called his trip on the Beagle "by far the most important event in my life," saying it "determined my whole career." His discoveries on this trip would introduce him to new thoughts that would challenge not only the colleagues of his scientific community, but Christian beliefs and the very society in which he had grown up. These thoughts would grow to become the foundation of his revolutionary theory of evolution.
