CHARLES DARWIN
Michael Ruse
Charles Robert Darwin was born in the English Midlands county of Shropshire on
February 12, 1809, the same day as Abraham Lincoln across the Atlantic. He died
at his home in Kent, south of London, on April 19, 1882. The fourth child, second
son, he was born into a distinguished and wealthy, upper-middle-class family. His
paternal grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, was well known as a brilliant physician,
friend of industrialists, and popular poet. His father, Robert Darwin, was also an
excellent physician, as well as being a money man. He would arrange mortgages
between landed gentry and aristocrats, with need of cash and land to mortgage,
and industrialists looking for safe ways to invest their earnings. On his mother’s
side, the line was even more distinguished, for Darwin’s maternal grandfather
was Josiah Wedgwood, who had industrialized the British pottery trade. Darwin
further sealed the Wedgwood connection (and supply of cash) when he married
his first cousin, Emma Wedgwood.^1 It is important from the start to emphasize
both the family status and wealth, to explain why Darwin never held a paid job
throughout his life — he had no need to (and he was a canny investor) — and
to make clear that Charles Darwin was never going to be the Christian God. He
was not about to reject his background. He was a genius of the first order, but his
genius would be to take what he had been given and to make of it a new picture
— rather like a kaleidoscope being rotated. Darwin was not in the business of
making something out of nothing.
Darwin was sent as a teenager to one of England’s leading private (confusingly
known as “public”) schools, Shrewsbury. From there, at the age of 17 he was
packed off to Edinburgh University, in the path of his father and grandfather, to
train as a physician. He hated the course, and two years later transferred down
to Cambridge University intended to become a Church of England parson. On
graduating in 1831, however, his clerical plans were postponed (and then shelved)
when through a friend of a friend he was offered a place onHMS Beagle, then
about to embark on a trip to South America in order to chart the waters. In all,
Darwin spent some five years on theBeagle, returning to England in the fall of- One result of the voyage is that he wrote up his diary as a narrative, and
this was published and became one of the most-loved travel books in Victorian
(^1) The most reliable and detailed biography of Charles Darwin is the two volume work by
Janet Browne [1995; 2002]. The most fun to read, although highly unreliable given the authors’
Marxist leanings, is by Adrian Desmond and James Moore [1992]. Even the title is over the edge.
Darwin’s own autobiography is not always reliable but a good read nevertheless [Darwin, 1969].
I have written on the Darwinian Revolution in Ruse [1979, new edition 1999a]. More generally
on the history of evolutionary thought, consult Ruse [19960;, 1999b;, 2003;, 2005]).
General editors: Dov M. Gabbay,
c
Handbook of the Philosophy of Science. Philosophy of Biology
Volume editors:
Paul Thagard and John Woods
Mohan Matthen and Christopher Stephens
©2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.