98 Evolution and the Fossil Record
fell when biological research destroyed man’s supposedly privileged place in creation
and proved his descent from the animal kingdom and his ineradicable animal nature.
This revaluation has been accomplished in our own days by Darwin, Wallace and their
predecessors, though not without the most violent contemporary opposition.For such a revolutionary idea, it is surprising that it came from such a conventional, out-
wardly conservative man. Charles Darwin was born of a family of doctors, including his
grandfather Erasmus, who was the king’s physician, and his father, Robert, also a distin-
guished physician. But evolution was in Charles’s blood as well. Erasmus wrote a 1794 poem
entitled Zoonomia, which contained some of the most advanced evolutionary speculation
of its time but was made less threatening by its poetic format and its religious references.
Young Charles could not help but be influenced by his grandfather’s ideas. When Charles
was a teenager, his father sent him to medical school in Edinburgh. Charles proved to have
no stomach for dissecting rotting corpses robbed from graves or watching people scream
through surgery (as was common in medicine then, because there were no anesthetics). He
was, however, exposed to the ideas of Robert Grant (the man who proved that sponges are
animals), who was in turn influenced by the French evolutionists like Lamarck and Geoffroy.
After Charles had dropped out of medical school, his father next sent him to Cambridge
University, where he could become a clergyman and do something useful with his life while
he pursued his mania for natural history collecting. There he neglected his theological stud-
ies and was instead influenced by botanist John Stevens Henslow and the geologist Adam
Sedgwick (first professor of geology anywhere in the world). Several years later, Darwin had
the opportunity to sail on the oceanographic voyage of the HMS Beagle. At first his father
was horrified at the prospect, but eventually he relented.
The voyage lasted 5 years (1831–1836) and the Beagle traveled completely around the
world. Darwin collected fossils of huge extinct animals in Argentina, climbed the Andes in
Chile, and was one of the first to study the anthropology of the natives of Tierra del Fuego, in
the freezing southern tip of South America. When the ship stopped at the Galapagos Islands
for water and food, Darwin ended up making many observations and collections, yet not
until he returned did he appreciate the importance of what he saw. The Beagle continued on
its journey to Australia and South Africa before finishing its survey of the Brazil-Argentina
coast and then returning home. When Darwin returned home, his father said, “Why, even
the shape of his head has changed!”
Even more remarkable is what had changed inside his head. As a Cambridge-educated,
wealthy gentleman, Darwin didn’t need to work for a living; he could conduct research and
access the elite scientific societies of the time. He set about publishing a book about his Beagle
voyage and a book about coral atolls in the Pacific, which immediately made his reputation.
He also made arrangements to have his specimens studied by the eminent specialists of
the day. He married his first cousin Emma Wedgwood (of the Wedgwood pottery family),
settled in the town of Down (just southeast of London), and began to raise a family. As he
began to work, he read the writings of the Reverend Thomas Malthus, who pointed out that
human populations were prone to exponential size increase unless held in check by death
and disease. Darwin also became a fancier of domestic pigeons and soon developed a net-
work of other gentlemen who raised and bred exotic domestic animals to develop unusual
varieties, practicing a form of artificial selection. These ideas, and many others, combined to
give Darwin his first notions of evolution by natural selection.