DARWIN, CHARLES ROBERT. - English naturalist and theorist of biology, b. at Shrewsbury on 12 Feb. 1809, d. at Down on 19 Apr. 1882.
A voyage, which lasted from 1851 to 1856, decided D.'s career, to whom certain phenomena, observed especially in South America, suggested the first nucleus of the theory; on his return, he wrote up the journal of the voyage, now known as Journal of a Naturalist Round the World (London 1839-45), and elaborated his notes on zoology and natural history.
In 1842 he settled at Down in Kent, where he devoted himself to composing a series of works among which are noteworthy the Geological Observations, with the celebrated theory on the origin of atolls, and the work on cirripedes. While he was collecting materials on the variation of animals and plants under domestication, he received a manuscript work by Wallace on the tendency of species to form varieties and on "natural selection," in which this naturalist arrived at conclusions analogous to those which he himself had communicated to friends some years earlier, but had not published. Wallace submitted his essay to the judgment of Lyell and D., and the latter, struck by the "surprising coincidence" (16 June 1858), consented that in July 1858 Lyell and Hooker should present to the Linnean Society the two summaries, that of his unpublished essay of 1842, just mentioned, and that which Wallace had then sent him from Malaysia. The following year (London 1859) saw the light The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, a work that went through 6 editions in England up to the author's death, and which made him the most popular naturalist of the nineteenth century.
Two others followed on the same subject, The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication (ibid. 1868) and The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (ibid. 1871). But he published others in the meantime and afterwards, in which the naturalist surpasses the theorist, on the fertilization of orchids, on insectivorous plants, on cross-fertilization in plants, on the formation of vegetable mould through the action of worms, works in which the author's talent and the importance of the observations nevertheless remain inferior to the audacity of the theorist of the earlier works.
Having died at Down, where he had resided for 40 years, D. was buried in London, in Westminster Abbey.
From the religious and philosophical point of view, D., having gradually moved away from the religiosity of his youth, arrived at radical doubt, fluctuating between a veiled deism and agnosticism. If even in the definitive edition of The Origin of Species there is talk of the Creator of the "first" or the "primeval" living form, this only demonstrates that D. held the opinion that evolutionism was compatible with belief in God: "my views are not necessarily atheistic." Certainly D. acknowledged that "chance" does not explain the world, and he was inclined to admit a Creator, but the force of the conclusions was weakened by a doubt that is perfectly logical in an evolutionist: "whether the convictions of a human mind developed from that of the lower animals are of any value or at all trustworthy."
(Int. Alinari)