1809-1882 · English naturalist who proposed the theory of evolution by natural selection
About Charles Darwin
Charles Darwin (1809-1882) sailed as naturalist on HMS Beagle from 1831 to 1836, an experience that shaped his later science. His travel narrative blends geology, natural history, anthropology, and imperial encounter. The observations he gathered during and after the voyage helped prepare the way for his theory of evolution by natural selection.
The Voyage of the Beagle is Darwin's account of his five-year journey around South America, the Pacific, Australia, and the Atlantic aboard HMS Beagle. It is a travel book before it is an evolutionary treatise: Darwin describes landscapes, fossils, earthquakes, volcanoes, coral reefs, animals, plants, Indigenous peoples, imperial violence, slavery, disease, and the practical hardships of field observation.
On the Origin of Species argues that species are not fixed, separately created kinds but populations changed over time by variation, inheritance, struggle, natural selection, and descent with modification. Darwin begins with variation under domestication, using pigeons, livestock, and cultivated plants to show how small differences can be preserved and accumulated.
The Descent of Man applies evolutionary theory to human beings and develops Darwin's account of sexual selection. Darwin argues that humans share ancestry with other animals and that differences between human and animal mental faculties are differences of degree rather than absolute kind.
Darwin's Expression of the Emotions is one of the founding works of comparative psychology. It asks how humans and animals express fear, anger, joy, grief, shame, disgust, attention, and other states through face, posture, voice, tears, hair, muscles, and involuntary action.