Darwin, Charles
Darwin, Charles
(1809-1882) The great English naturalist who gathered masses of data on the famous voyage of the Beagle and then spent twenty additional years shaping his pronouncement of an evolutionary hypothesis in The Origin of Species, published in 1859. He was not the first to advance the idea of the kinship of all life but is memorable as the expositor of a provocative and simple explanation in his theory of natural selection. He served to establish firmly in all scientific minds the fact of evolution even if there remains doubt as to the precise method or methods of evolution. From his premises, he elaborated a subsidiary doctrine of sexual selection. In addition to the biological explanations, there appear some keen observations and conclusions for ethics particularly in his later Descent of Man. Evolution, since his day, has been of moment in all fields of thought. See Evolutionism, Natural Selection, Struggle for Existence. — L.E.D.