Thinkers Timeline

Charles Darwin (1809-1882) was an English naturalist and biologist. He was born in Shrewsbury into a wealthy and intellectually distinguished family: his grandfather Erasmus Darwin had written about the idea of species transforming over time. He studied medicine in Edinburgh and then theology at Cambridge, but his real passion was natural history. In 1831, at the age of twenty-two, he joined the voyage of HMS Beagle as the ship's naturalist on a five-year journey around the world. What he observed on that voyage, particularly the variation among species on the Galapagos Islands, planted the seeds of his great theory. He spent the following twenty years accumulating evidence and working out his ideas before publishing On the Origin of Species in 1859. He knew the book would be controversial and he was right: it transformed not only biology but how human beings understood themselves and their place in the natural world. He spent the rest of his life at his home in Kent, continuing to work on natural history, corresponding with scientists worldwide, and quietly revolutionising biology from his study and garden. He died in 1882 and was buried in Westminster Abbey.