Charles Darwin

Darwin, Charles R.             World famous naturalist and geologist (1809-82) who achieved lasting fame by presenting the scientific community with the argument that there was such a thing as evolution and it could be explained through natural and sexual selection. That theory is now one of the critical foundations of biological-paleontological science. Darwin was born into a well-educated and cultured family. His grandfather, the well known Erasmus Darwin, and his father were medical doctors and his mother was the eldest child of the famous pottery industrialist, Josiah Wedgwood. Darwin first studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh but it soon became obvious he was not cut out for a medical career, since he was horrified by the brutal surgical practices of the day. After two years he transferred to Cambridge University (Christ’s Church) in 1828 to train for the ministry.

Not many people realize that Darwin was a first-class geoscientist. Certainly he was a world-class biologist and evolutionary thinker (pun intended), but a geoscientist? His ideas on the formation of coral atolls alone should be enough to disabuse skeptical readers of that bit of misinformation. But there’s much more to the story. The irony of Darwin’s success as a geologist was that he had practically no formal education on the subject. In his second year at the University of Edinburgh (before he dropped out — take heart all ye who harbor thoughts of turning to cosmetology or truck driving rather than staying in school) he attended the lectures of one Robert Jameson, a geology professor who was a staunch proponent of Abraham Gottlob Werner’s neptunist theory. Apparently all Darwin remembered of that chilling experience was that Jameson was incredibly dull, as was his discipline.
Author’s Note: Jameson must have been not too unlike several of my first geology professors, one of whom — the departmental chairman no less — would read to his classes from notes written decades previously on yellowed paper so old and brittle they looked as though each page would break into tiny pieces if he didn't exercise the greatest care when turning them. 
However, the sole effect that experience produced on young Darwin was the determination that never as long as he lived would he crack open a book on geology or in any way study such an intellectually boring topic. Darwin left Edinburgh for Cambridge to complete a degree that would prepare him for a safe if not exciting life as a member of the Anglican clergy. At the same time he continued his extracurricular pursuit of the natural sciences and met various distinguished scholars and first-rate intellects, including John Stevens Henslow (mineralogist, botanist and Anglican priest who became one of Darwin’s lifelong friends), Adam Sedgwick (famous field geologist and reluctant Anglican priest), and William Whewell (a towering intellect who was an Anglican priest, philosopher, theologian, astronomer, geologist, and historian of science whose second volume of the three volume History of the Inductive Sciences from the Earliest to the Present Time, published in 1857 and reissued 1976, contained an analysis of uniformitarian and catastrophist views of Earth history; note that his surname is pronounced Hugh-ell). Darwin’s enthusiastic interest in science impressed those men, each of whom became his mentor in various ways. As a result, despite an initial antipathy for geology and what he thought were terminally boring practitioners, Darwin, who graduated with a degree in divinity in mid-1831, spent the better part of August 1831 on a geological tour of Wales with the well-known geologist, Adam Sedgwick, who at the time was studying rocks that he would later define as the Cambrian system.

On that extended field trip Darwin was exposed not only to a brilliant mind but for the first time to a trained scientist who was in the process of inventing and pioneering the techniques of geological field research. Darwin (who was 22-years-old) returned home at the end of August to learn that he had been recommended by his Cambridge botany professor, John Henslow, as the naturalist for the upcoming H.M.S. Beagle voyage under Captain Robert FitzRoy (an illegitimate descendant of King Charles II and at the time only 26 himself but already a master seaman and highly skilled hydrographic surveyor). It turned out that Darwin had been recommended for the position more for his skills as a well-bred gentleman that would enable him to socialize with the Beagle’s aristocratic captain than because of his formal training as a naturalist. Darwin’s father graciously agreed to pay the costs of his son’s passage (and that of the young man’s personal servant no less) aboard the hydrographic survey ship Beagle, which at a compact 90-feet-long and a crew of 74 was thought by many naval officers to be too small to survive the horrific winds and life-threatening storms at the southern tip of South America. However, they sailed in 1831 with Darwin acting as an unpaid naturalist and gentleman companion for Captain FitzRoy, who financed the expedition entirely from his own pockets.

Author’s Note: In one of life’s truly delicious ironies, Robert FitzRoy had hoped to use information gathered on the voyage to produce scientific proof that the creation story in the Book of Genesis was literally true, since at that time the Good Book was under considerable fire from geologists who advocated uniformitarianism over various combinations of neptunism, catastrophism, and what amounted to a strict creationism (Additional Author’s Note: James Ussher, Anglican Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland between 1625 and 1656, famously published a chronology that dated the Creation from the evening of October 22, 4004 BC.). Darwin was only 22-years-old at the time and would be 27 when the ship returned to England but he was more than able to hold his own with FitzRoy in forming and defending his rapidly emerging geological and evolutionary concepts.

Life, of course, takes twists and turns few of us would believe if found in a work of fiction. One of those strange occurrences came as a welcoming gift when FitzRoy presented Darwin with the first volume of Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology, which had been published the year before. During the many long and boring days at sail, Darwin dedicated himself to exhaustively pouring over the text as well as the next two volumes, which were sent by his father to upcoming ports of call while the Beagle was at sea. Needless to say, he became self-taught in geology, home schooled (under sail) as it were; a totally different type of years before the mast than experienced by the author Richard Henry Dana Jr.

In Chile on February 20, 1835, Darwin experienced a very strong earthquake and shortly afterward observed first-hand evidence of uplift (vertical throw) in the region in the range of at least several feet. One important aspect of Lyell’s principles was the concept of a steady-state, nondirectional Earth. Uplift, subsidence, erosion, and deposition were all in balance. But the evidence in front of Darwin’s eyes contradicted that theoretical construct. In his mind Darwin coupled the unmistakable and dramatic evidence of uplift that he had witnessed with the processes of subsidence, erosion, and deposition and began developing concepts that were totally unlike anything he had read in Lyell’s work. Consequently, he hypothesized, before actually seeing coral reefs or atolls of the Pacific or Indian Oceans, that they may have developed on the margins of subsiding land masses, passing through the three stages of fringing reef, barrier reef, and atoll.

In his very well received 1842 book on coral reefs, Darwin published a map of the southwest Pacific showing the distribution of fringing and barrier reefs and atolls that firmly established his reputation in geology long before his ideas on evolution became known. Although Darwin’s theory of coral reefs and atolls was his best known contribution to the then new science of geology, he made others of equal interest that are not well known today. For example, he observed that country rocks were altered by contact with hot lava; surface rupture and displacement resulted from earthquakes; extinct organisms were fossilized; he demonstrated cleavage and foliation in metamorphic rocks and the relation of those rocks to the formation of mountains; he showed that evidence for differing climates in the past was based on fossils and glacial deposits; and noted dramatic changes in physical geography especially those related to sea level fluctuations. Perhaps even more significant than the above examples, in 1844 Darwin described igneous flows from the Galápagos Islands in which the lowest flows contained greater proportions of feldspar crystals, leading to his pioneering theory that density differences between crystals and melt would result in mechanical separation of those two phases and the formation of different magma types. Today that process is known as gravity settling and was the focus of detailed experimental studies by the famous geochemist and experimental petrologist, Norman L. Bowen.

In 1859, after several decades of writing, intense reflection, and rewriting Darwin published his master work, Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection.[1] The book was a run-away success and an instant scientific and popular hit (the first edition was sold out on the first day it was offered for sale) over which the dust has yet to settle. The point Darwin made in his best-seller was clear. Just as humans can selectively breed dogs or cattle or horses by exaggerating one or another minor variation (like size or speed), so nature selects similar variations by only permitting animals with the most successful variations to survive and reproduce in the struggle over limited resources. Darwin named that theory natural selection. In 1868, he published The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication. In 1871, he came out with what were really two block-buster books in one volume: The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex. In 1872, The Expression of Emotion was published in which he discussed the evolution of the signals that animals use to communicate and related those signals to human emotional expression, fields now known as sociobiology and evolutionary psychology. In addition, Darwin wrote Fertilization of Orchids (1862), Climbing Plants and Insectivorous Plants (both in 1875), Different Forms of Flowers on Plants of the Same Species (1877), The Power of Movement in Plants (1880), and the Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms (1881).

Additional Author’s Note: Agree or disagree with Darwin’s ideas about evolution and the survival of the fittest or natural selection, he was one of the truly great contributors to science in history and to the way we understand the natural world and the place of humans in it. If you’re looking for a good read that dives head first into that topic, paleontologist Niles Eldredge, who proposed the theory of punctuated equilibria in 1972 with Stephen Jay Gould, has written several fascinating books on evolutionary theory as well as a more popular work focusing on Darwin himself, Darwin: Discovering the Tree of Life. New York: W.W. Norton, 2005, which was a companion to the 2006 Darwin exhibit organized by the American Museum of Natural History in New York, where Eldredge is Curator of the Department of Invertebrates.

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[1] Available online at: http://www.literature.org/authors/darwin-charles/the-origin-of-species/.