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Darwin, Charles (Robert)

The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature

Darwin, Charles (Robert) (1809–82), educated at Edinburgh University and Christ's College, Cambridge. He embarked in 1831 with Fitzroy as naturalist on the Beagle, bound for South America, returned in 1836, and published Journal of Researches into the Geology and Natural History of the Various Countries Visited by H.M.S. Beagle (1839). His great work On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection appeared in 1859. Darwin had received from A. R. Wallace a manuscript containing a sketch of his theory. Building upon the Uniformitarian geology of Charles Lyell (1797–1875), which supposed a very great antiquity for the earth and slow, regular change, Darwin argued for a natural, not divine, origin of species. In the competitive struggle for existence, creatures possessing advantageous mutations would be favoured, eventually evolving into new species. In the ‘survival of the fittest’ (a phrase coined by H. Spencer, but accepted by Darwin) organic descent was achieved by natural selection, by analogy with the artificial selection of the stock-breeder. An agnostic, Darwin saw no higher moral or religious ends in evolution. Darwin's book gave rise to intense opposition, but found distinguished supporters in T. H. Huxley, Lyell, and Sir Joseph Hooker (1817–1911); the reverberation of his ideas can be seen throughout the literature of the second half of the 19th cent. In The Descent of Man (1871) Darwin discussed sexual selection, and argued that man too had evolved, from the higher primates. A dedicated naturalist, Darwin also wrote extensively on barnacles, earthworms, and orchids, and was a pioneer observer of animal behaviour. The Life and Letters of Darwin, edited by his son Francis Darwin, appeared 1887–8.

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