↣ Charles Darwin

Charles Robert Darwin was born in Sherewsbury on February 12, 1809.

Son of Robert Waring Darwin, a famous local doctor, and Susannah Wedgwood, daughter of Josiah Wedgwood.

His paternal grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, was also a well-known physician and important naturalist.

Charles had a brother and three sisters older than himself and one young sister.

His mother died when he was 8 years old.

His education was at a local school and Darwin remembers him as the worst thing that could happen to his intellectual development.

Since childhood he was very fond of natural history with a great hobby of collecting things (shells, stamps, coins or minerals), the kind of passion that will lead you to become a systematic naturalist and in an expert.

In 1825 Darwin entered the University of Edinburgh to study medicine by decision of his father.

Young Charles, however, failed to take an interest in the race; since he considered surgical operations repugnant and did not he found motivation in what his teachers taught him.

Darwin thought that on the death of his father he would receive his inheritance and that would allow him a comfortable subsistence without the need to exercise a profession like that of a doctor.  So, after two courses, his father, determined to prevent him from becoming an idle son of family, he proposed an ecclesiastical career.

Resolving his own qualms about his faith, Darwin gladly accepted he liked the idea of ​​becoming a country clergyman, and early in 1828, having refreshed his classical training, he entered the Christ's Cambridge College.

At Cambridge, Darwin wasted no time in study, but he began to be interested in painting and music, although he was a bad musician and a bad painter.

More than the academic studies he was forced to take, Darwin profited at Cambridge from his voluntary attendance at classes botanist and entomologist John Henslow, whose friendship brought him "a inestimable benefit" and who had a direct intervention in two events that determined his future: The expedition to Wales and the voyage of the beagle.

At the end of his studies in April 1831, Reverend Henslow convinced him to delve into geology and introduced Adam Sedgwick, founder of the Cambrian system, who started precisely

his studies of it on an expedition to North Wales carried out in April of that same year in the company of Darwin.

But the decisive importance of the figure of the reverend in the life of Darwin is measured first of all by the fact that it was Henslow who provided Darwin with the opportunity to embark as a naturalist with Captain Robert Fitzroy and accompany him on the voyage he proposed to carry out aboard the Beagle around the world.

At first his father opposed the project, stating that only would change his mind if "someone with common sense" was able to consider the trip advisable.

That someone was his uncle Josiah Wedgwood, who interceded on behalf of that his young nephew participate in the expedition; meanwhile, the purpose of traveling had been consolidated in Darwin for months before, when reading the works of the German naturalist Alexander Humboldt aroused in him an immediate desire to visit Tenerife and he began

to learn Spanish and find out about ticket prices.

Naming Charles Darwin is, even today, an equivalent of debate and controversy. The theories developed by the British naturalist represented a revolution in narrowly open-minded Victorian England and in society of the 19th century in its entirety, to the point that it changed the very conception that he had of the world and of the human being.

Admired by many and repudiated by others, Charles Darwin and his studies continue

being the order of the day in the scientific world even though they were made

Two centuries.

Time line

1809	He was born in Shrewsbury.
1825	He entered the University of Edinburgh to study medicine.
1828	Begins a theology degree at Cambridge.
1830	Botanist John Henslow arouses Darwin's interest in natural history.
1831-1836	Travel with the Beagle as a naturalist for a voyage of exploration.
1837	He moves to London.
1839	He published “A Naturalist's Voyage Around the World on the H.M.S Beagle.”
1842	First draft of the theory of evolution. He was installed in Down.
1858	Joint presentation, before the Linnean Society, of the theory of the selection of Darwin and A.R. Wallace.
1859	He published “The Origin of Species.”
1862	He published “On the intervention of insects in the fertilization of orchids.”
1871	He published “The Descent of Man and Selection in Realtion to Sex human and sexual selection.”
1877	First Spanish translation of “The Origin of Species.”
1881	He published “On the influence of earthworms in the formation of topsoil.”
1882	He died in Down.