Darwin and evolution

GET1020

Dr John van Wyhe

Contents © J. van Wyhe et al. The reproduction of

these slides is against national and international law.
Illegal distribution or sale will be prosecuted.
See the blurb on the Darwin Online Facebook page
Shrewsbury, England
 Shrewsbury

Watercolour by J. Bather (Shrewsbury Museum & Art Gallery)

Pattison, The Darwins
of Shrewsbury (2009)
The Mount
Dr Robert Darwin (1766-1848),
Charles Darwin’s father

Dr Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802),

Darwin’s grandfather
Susannah Wedgwood Darwin, Darwin’s mother. The Josiah Wedgwood family, 1780
The Parish Church of
St. Chad's, where
Darwin was baptized
and went to church as
a child.
The Unitarian Chapel,
Shrewsbury.

Darwin was taken to church

here by his mother until her
death in 1817.

The Italianate facade was

added in 1839.
Charles Darwin, aged seven,
and his sister Catherine,
c. 1816.
 Shrewsbury School
Shrewsbury Grammar School (1818-1825)
Edinburgh University (1825-1827)
• Alexander Monro III “made his lectures on human anatomy as dull,
as he was himself, and the subject disgusted me.” Darwin.

• “On occasion, he even read out his grandfather's notes rather than
drawing up a new lecture relevant to the anatomical developments
of the era—to the point of reciting, ‘When I was a student in Leiden
in 1719’ ...” Janet Browne, Darwin: Voyaging, 1995.
• See some of Darwin’s student notes from
his anatomy course with Dr Munro on
Darwin Online here and here.
Burke and Hare
Darwin took further classes in:
• 'Practice of Physic'
• 'Midwifery'
• ‘Chemistry’ (See some of Darwin’s chemistry notes on Darwin Online here. )
• Robert Jameson's Geology and Zoology:
c. 100 lectures, 5 days a week for 5 months
November-April.
• Neptunists vs Plutonists?

An extract from Darwin’s “Chymestry” notes

Dr Robert Grant (1793-1874),
expert on marine invertebrates

• A freethinker

• A fierce Lamarckian

• Introduced Darwin to
scientific jealousy and
competition
 ‘Flustra’

Dr Grant studied lower orders of marine life: simple corals, sponges, and
"flustra," or "zoophytes," = “animal-plants” Now called Bryozoa.
 Darwin’s first scientific paper:
‘On the Ova of Flustra’, 1827
See it on Darwin Online here.

• “in which he announces that he has

discovered organs of motion, and,
secondly that the small black body hitherto
mistaken for the young of Fucus loreus is
in reality the ovum of Pontobdella
muricata”.

• See the whole of Darwin’s ‘Edinburgh notebook’ on Darwin Online here.

Cambridge
 University of Cambridge (1828-1831)

• View of Cambridge. Drawn by R. Harraden, etched by L. Byrne, 1809. This and other illustrations are from
my book Charles Darwin in Cambridge. There are copies in the Central Library, Science Library, Bookhaven
Map of Cambridge, 1831. Christ’s College is in red.
 Christ’s College,
Cambridge.
Re-founded in
1505.

• See Darwin’s re-

discovered student
bills on Darwin
Online here.
Christ’s College in 1690
Darwin’s restored student rooms in 2009
Some of Darwin’s beetles, now at the Cambridge Zoology Museum.
Catch a beetle at any cost?
Some of Darwin’s student
beetle notes

You can see the whole list

on Darwin Online here.
Rev. John Stevens Henslow
(1796-1861),
Cambridge
professor of botany

Botanic gardens
 Alexander von Humboldt’s
Narrative of travels to South America
which is available with an introduction on Darwin Online here.
John Herschel’s Preliminary discourse. (1831)
Also available on Darwin Online, here.

• Essentially an overview of the

science of the day - and a very
whiggish history of science – it’s all
about progress. Science will keep
improving.

• Herschel saw a law of continuity

which meant that all parts of nature
and science will be interconsistent.

• He stressed collecting masses of

facts and coming to inductive
conclusions based on them.
Rev. Adam Sedgwick (1785-1873), professor of geology

• He studied the most ancient rocks

and fossils. He wrote in a review of
Vestiges in 1845:
"Now, I allow (as all geologists must
do) a kind of progressive
development. For example, the first
fish are below the reptiles; and the
first reptiles older than man. I say, we
have successive forms of animal life
adapted to successive conditions (so
far, proving design), and not derived
in natural succession in the ordinary
way of generation… [so] how did they
begin? I reply, by a way out of and
above common known, material
nature, and this way I call creation."