short account of Charles Robert darwin
Answers
Answer:
Charles Darwin was born on February 12, 1809, the very day that, half-way across the world in a log shack in Kentucky, Nancy Lincoln would give birth to Abraham, a boy with a likewise hidden destiny. Charles was preceded by Marianne, Caroline, Susan, and his best boyhood friend and only brother, Erasmus, and then Emily came along afterward.
Charles was the son of Robert Darwin, a prosperous physician and industrial financier. Robert was the son of the famous physician-poet-evolutionist Erasmus Darwin. Today we remember Charles and forget Erasmus, but for nearly the first three decades of Charles’ life, he was Erasmus Darwin’s grandson — the grandson of England’s most famous evolutionist (or transmutationist, as it was then called).
That’s an important point to make about his life. Charles Darwin didn’t discover evolution. Evolution was old hat as a theory, and had been circulating in radical circles in England and France for at least a half-century before he was born. Charles imbibed the theory from his grandfather and father. Although Erasmus died before his grandson was born, Charles carefully studied his grandfather’s evolutionary treatise, the Zoonomia, sometime in the mid-1820s, long before he stepped on the HMS Beagle. Robert Darwin affirmed transmutationism as well, although he kept his opinions to himself.
So, when Charles Darwin was hurried off to medical school at Edinburgh in 1825, he was already well-versed in evolutionary theory. When he got there, he soon realized that he wasn’t cut out for medicine (as he discovered, there’s nothing like witnessing surgery without anesthetic on a small boy to sharpen one’s sense of vocation to medicine, or lack thereof). Rather than spend time on his studies, he began working under the transmutationist, Robert Grant, and generally had a good time, riding, shooting, eating, and acting the young gentleman.
It soon became clear to his father, that Charles was failing at the family vocation of medicine. It was decided that, as a last resort, he might cut it as an Anglican parson with a country parish. Few demands, a fair living, and lots of time for shooting, running dogs, hunting, and amateur natural history. Darwin shuffled off to Cambridge in January of 1828 to get an undergraduate degree in preparation for more advanced study to become a man of the cloth.
We should not overrate Darwin’s piety here. The Darwin’s were long-standing liberal Whigs. Erasmus was, if anything, the thinnest of theists, and Robert was most likely an atheist. The Anglican Creed and the Bible were considered relics of superstitious ages they dearly hoped would be left far behind as the Enlightenment marched forward. That Robert would send his son to become an Anglican parson tells us more about the state of the Anglican Church at the time than it does about Charles’ piety. That Charles could, in his Autobiography, insist that at the time he accepted the Creed and the literal truth of the Bible reveals him as less than forthright.