Charles Darwin

Charles Darwin was born in Shrewsbury in 1809 and lost his mother at eight. His father, a wealthy doctor, sent him to Edinburgh to study medicine; he fled an operation on a child, performed without anaesthetic, and never went back. He was sent to Cambridge instead to become a clergyman, and spent most of his time collecting beetles.

The offer of a place on HMS Beagle in 1831 came through a professor who had noticed him. His father objected to the whole idea. He was seasick for most of the five-year voyage, but what he saw and collected, in South America and the Galapagos, unsettled everything he had been taught about the fixity of species. By 1838, reading Malthus on population, he had the core of natural selection.

Then he stopped. He wrote it up privately in 1844, with instructions to his wife to publish if he died, and turned to eight years of work on barnacles. He was ill for the rest of his life with vomiting, palpitations and exhaustion that no doctor could explain. In 1851 his daughter Annie died at ten, which ended what remained of his religious faith. He knew what his theory would do to it in others.

In 1858 a letter arrived from Alfred Russel Wallace, in the Malay Archipelago, setting out the same idea. The two were presented together, and Darwin wrote On the Origin of Species in a year. It sold out on publication. He died in 1882 and was buried in Westminster Abbey.