Charles Darwin
team aboard the H.M.S. Beagle. The team visited places throughout the world, and he was able to study plants and animals everywhere they went (World Book 40). During the almost five year voyage, Darwin observed and collected large numbers of rocks, animals, and plants that would later prove to be the foundations of the five-volume Zoology of the Beagle that was published in nineteen installments between 1838 and 1843 (Porter 10).
After his voyages to many different islands and countries, Darwin returned to England in 1836 and settled in London. In 1839 he met and married his cousin, Emma Wedgewood, and in 1824, they and their two children moved to Downe. Charles and Emma would go on to have eight more children and would live at Downe for the remainder of their lives (World Book 40). By the age of seventy-three, Charles Darwin had published numerous works and had received many awards and honors, but by this time, his health was fading. On April 19, 1882, Charles Darwin passed away due to Angina Pectoris Syncope, the gradual ceasing of the heart (Brown 495).
Darwin's great work, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection was published in 1859 and was heavily attacked because it did not support the depiction of creation given in the book of Genesis. Before Darwin, the French anatomist and botanist, Jean-Babtiste de Lamarck, had stressed the variations in species and had given an account of human development that was plainly evolutionary in spirit (Beer 266). Darwin's argument that natural selection worked automatically thus leaving little or no room for divine guidance or design. All species, he reasoned, produce far too many offspring for them all to survive, and therefore those with favorable variations are selected (Beer 177).
At Darwin's hands, evolution matured into a well-developed scientific theory, which has been a constant target of religious or pseudo-scientific attacks (World Book 41). However, Darwin himself did not at first explicitly apply the evolutionary theory to human beings. "You ask me whether I shall discuss man," he wrote in 1857, "I think I shall avoid the whole subject, as so surrounded by prejudice" (Bowlby 326). He also knew that his challenge to Biblical doctrine would cause stress to his friends and family, among them his religious wife, and yet Darwin still published The Descent of Man, Selection in Relation To Sex and Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals, which showed the similarities between animals and man in the expression of emotions and was the start of the science of ethnology (Bowlby 328). The remainder of Darwin's books dealt with plants. In Insectivorous Plants, he explored how a plant, the sundew, catches, ingests, and digests flies (Porter 399).