Charles Darwin
Quotes & Wisdom
Charles Darwin changed how humanity understands its place in nature, proposing that all life shares common ancestry and evolves through natural selection. This idea - simple in principle, revolutionary in implication - made modern biology possible and forced reconsideration of humanity's uniqueness. The young naturalist who sailed on HMS Beagle became, after decades of careful work, the Victorian sage whose "Origin of Species" sparked debates that continue today. Darwin worked slowly, documented exhaustively, and dreaded the controversy his ideas would provoke. His combination of intellectual courage and personal caution created a scientific revolution undertaken with the demeanor of a country gentleman.
Context & Background
Charles Robert Darwin was born on February 12, 1809, in Shrewsbury, England, into a family of physicians and freethinkers. His grandfather Erasmus Darwin had speculated about evolution decades earlier; his father Robert was a successful doctor. The family was wealthy enough that Charles would never need to work for money - a circumstance essential to his scientific career.
Early nineteenth-century Britain was industrial, imperial, and confident. The Church of England provided ideological stability; natural theology saw God's design in nature's intricate adaptations. Young Darwin was expected to become a country parson - a respectable career for a gentleman naturalist. He studied medicine at Edinburgh (and couldn't stand it), then divinity at Cambridge (where he preferred beetle collecting to theology).
The invitation to sail on HMS Beagle as gentleman companion to Captain FitzRoy transformed his life. The five-year voyage (1831-1836) took him around the world, from Brazilian rainforests to Patagonian fossils to the Galapagos Islands. He collected specimens obsessively, observed geological formations that suggested vast timescales, and accumulated evidence that would undermine everything he had been taught about life's history.
The Victorian intellectual climate was both stimulating and constraining. Geology had already pushed Earth's history back millions of years; but the fixity of species remained orthodox. Earlier evolutionists like Lamarck had proposed mechanisms that seemed speculative. Darwin's challenge was to find a mechanism that explained adaptation through natural, observable processes.
The insight came in 1838, reading Thomas Malthus on population. Malthus argued that populations grow faster than food supplies, creating struggle for existence. Darwin saw how this applied to all life: individuals vary; some variations help survival and reproduction; successful variants leave more offspring. Over vast time, this process could transform species.
He called it natural selection - nature selecting successful variants as breeders select for desired traits. The mechanism was elegant, explanatory, and disturbing. It required no divine intervention, no purpose, no progress - only variation, inheritance, and differential reproduction. Design emerged without a designer.
Darwin didn't rush to publish. He spent years studying barnacles, accumulating evidence, anticipating objections. His health, never robust, deteriorated; he became a semi-invalid, rarely leaving his country home at Down House. Some historians suspect psychosomatic illness expressing anxiety about his theory's implications.
Only when Alfred Russel Wallace independently conceived natural selection did Darwin finally act. Papers by both were read to the Linnean Society in 1858; Darwin then rushed "On the Origin of Species" into print in 1859. The first edition sold out on the day of publication.
"Origin of Species" presents the case for evolution through natural selection with meticulous detail and careful qualification. Darwin marshaled evidence from biogeography, paleontology, embryology, and artificial selection. He acknowledged difficulties - the incompleteness of the fossil record, the problem of complex organs like the eye - while arguing that the theory explained more than any alternative.
The book never mentions human evolution directly - Darwin would address that in "The Descent of Man" (1871). But readers understood the implication. If all life shared common ancestry, humans were not special creations but products of the same processes that shaped every other species.
Reception was mixed. Scientists like Thomas Henry Huxley ("Darwin's bulldog") championed the theory; others resisted. The famous 1860 Oxford debate between Huxley and Bishop Samuel Wilberforce became legend, though accounts of what was actually said vary wildly. Religious objections were vigorous but not universal - some Christians saw evolution as God's method.
Darwin largely avoided public controversy, letting others fight his battles. He continued publishing: on orchids, on earthworms, on the expression of emotions in humans and animals. Each work extended evolutionary thinking into new domains while maintaining the careful, evidence-based approach that characterized all his work.
"The Descent of Man" (1871) applied natural selection to humanity explicitly. Darwin argued that humans descended from ape-like ancestors, that racial differences were superficial variations of a single species, and that sexual selection - competition for mates - explained many human characteristics.
The book also included passages reflecting Victorian prejudices about race and gender that modern readers find troubling. Darwin was a man of his time, an abolitionist who nonetheless assumed European superiority, a loving husband who believed women intellectually inferior to men. His science did not automatically overcome cultural assumptions.
Yet his fundamental argument - that humans are part of nature, continuous with other animals, explicable through the same processes - transformed anthropology, psychology, and philosophy. The implications are still being worked out. What does it mean for ethics, for meaning, for human self-understanding, if we are not special creations but products of blind natural processes?
Darwin's domestic life provided stability for his revolutionary work. He married his cousin Emma Wedgwood in 1839; they had ten children, three of whom died young. Emma's religious faith conflicted with Charles's growing agnosticism, a tension they managed with mutual respect. He worried that his theory would separate them in any afterlife.
His working methods were distinctive. He conducted experiments in his garden and greenhouse, corresponded with hundreds of naturalists worldwide, and accumulated evidence with patience that modern scientists might find maddening. He once spent eight years studying barnacles before feeling ready to tackle larger questions.
The illness that plagued him for decades - vomiting, heart palpitations, exhaustion - has been variously diagnosed as Chagas disease (possibly contracted in South America), panic disorder, or psychosomatic response to stress. Whatever its cause, it shaped his lifestyle: regular walks, limited social contact, afternoon rest, work in careful doses.
He died on April 19, 1882, and was buried in Westminster Abbey, near Isaac Newton - recognition that his revolution in biology matched Newton's in physics. The man who had dreaded controversy became, in death, a symbol of scientific achievement honored by the establishment he had challenged. His ideas remain contested by some, but within science, his fundamental insight is as secure as any in biology: life evolves, and natural selection is its primary mechanism.
Charles Darwin Quotes
“Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
We stopped looking for monsters under our bed when we realized that they were inside us.
...Whilst on board the Beagle I was quite orthodox, and I remember being heartily laughed at by several of the officers... for quoting the Bible as an unanswerable authority on some point of morality... But I had gradually come by this time, i.e., 1836 to 1839, to see that the Old Testament from its manifestly false history of the world, with the Tower of Babel, the rainbow at sign, &c., &c., and from its attributing to God the feelings of a revengeful tyrant, was no more to be trusted than the sacred books of the Hindoos, or the beliefs of any barbarian.
The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to remain an agnostic.
There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.
If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.
The love for all living creatures is the most noble attribute of man.
It is not the strongest of the species that survives,
I am not apt to follow blindly the lead of other men
Intelligence is based on how efficient a species became at doing the things they need to survive.
An American monkey, after getting drunk on brandy, would never touch it again, and thus is much wiser than most men.
The highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognise that we ought to control our thoughts.
But I am very poorly today & very stupid & I hate everybody & everything. One lives only to make blunders.
In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.
Besides love and sympathy, animals exhibit other qualities connected with the social instincts which in us would be called moral.
“False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science, for they often endure long; but false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, for everyone takes a salutary pleasure in proving their falseness; and when this is done, one path towards error is closed and the road to truth is often at the same time opened.”
“Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.”
“Scientists are the destroyers of myths and sometimes the myths they destroy are there own.”
“It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us.”
“I have steadily endeavoured to keep my mind free, so as to give up any hypothesis, however much beloved (and I cannot resist forming one on every subject), as soon as facts are shown to be opposed to it.”
“One day, on tearing off some old bark, I saw two rare beetles, and seized one in each hand. Then I saw a third and new kind, which I could not bear to lose, so I popped the one which I held in my right hand into my mouth. Alas! it ejected some intensely acrid fluid, which burnt my tongue so that I was forced to spit the beetle out, which was lost, as was the third one.”
“...But I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidæ with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice... I feel most deeply that the whole subject is too profound for the human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton. Let each man hope and believe what he can.”
“A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life.”
“If I had my life to live over again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week.”
“A grain in the balance will determine which individual shall live and which shall die - which variety or species shall increase in number, and which shall decrease, or finally become extinct.”
“In conclusion, it appears that nothing can be more improving to a young naturalist, than a journey in distant countries.”
“To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I confess, absurd in the highest degree...The difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection , though insuperable by our imagination, should not be considered subversive of the theory.”
“We can allow satellites, planets, suns, universe, nay whole systems of universe, to be governed by laws, but the smallest insect, we wish to be created at once by special act.”
“The following proposition seems to me in a high degree probable—namely, that any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts, the parental and filial affections being here included, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well, or nearly as well developed, as in man. For, firstly, the social instincts lead an animal to take pleasure in the society of its fellows, to feel a certain amount of sympathy with them, and to perform various services for them.”
“One general law, leading to the advancement of all organic beings, namely, multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die.”
“To kill an error is as good a service as, and sometimes even better than, the establishing of a new truth or fact.”
“Why is thought being a secretion of brain, more wonderful than gravity a property of matter? It is our arrogance, our admiration of ourselves.”
“The limit of man s knowledge in any subject possesses a high interest which is perhaps increased by its close neighbourhood to the realms of imagination.”
“Nothing is easier than to admit in words the truth of the universal struggle for life, or more difficult--at least I have found it so--than constantly to bear this conclusion in mind.”
“If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. But I can find no such case.”