Charles Darwin is one of the most famous biologists and naturalists in the world of science. He was born to Robert Darwin and Susannah Darwin on February 12, 1809. Since his father Robert Darwin was a successful physician, so in general he belonged to a wealthy and respected family. He had five siblings with whom he would attend the Unitarian chapel along with their mother. However, unfortunately his mother died in July 1817 when he was only eight years old. He started attending University of Edinburgh Medical School in October 1825, but found lectures dull and surgeries distressing. Due to this he had started neglecting studies and so his father sent him to Christ’s College, Cambridge, to study Bachelor of Arts degree. He graduated from Cambridge in 1831.
Charles’s Darwin was always interested in studying natural history and so planned to visit Tenerife with some of his classmates after graduation in order to study natural history in the tropics. On 29th July 1838 he visited his cousin Emma Wedgwood and ended up marrying her on January 29, 1839. According to Darwin, marriage came with an advantage of having constant companion and a friend in old age. After marriage he had ten children and two of them died in infancy. Anne Elizabeth Darwin was his second child and his eldest daughter. She died at the age of ten and her death had a traumatic effect on both Darwin and his wife Emma. Being a devoted father, Darwin always feared when his children fell ill that they might have inherited weakness due to inbreeding as he shared close family ties with his wife and cousin. So he examined inbreeding in his writings and compared it to advantages of outbreeding in many species.
Darwin today is known for his Theory of evolution and in 1859 he published his book On the Origin of Species. He proposed one of the main fundamental concepts in science that all species have descended from a common ancestor. In 1882 he was diagnosed with a heart disease and unfortunately died on April 19, 1882.
Sources: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Charles-Darwin
Applied Plant Ecology Winter 2020 