Charles Darwin
1809–1882 · England
“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.”
Peak-work percentile in the canon.
Charles Darwin
1809–1882 · England
“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.”
Peak-work percentile in the canon.
The lineage through Charles Darwin
Inspired(3)
who Charles Darwin shaped
- Hardy was, by his own account, "among the earliest acclaimers" of this book, and stood at Darwin's funeral in Westminster Abbey
- Tess is the novel that takes Darwin's pitiless nature personally — heredity as fate, the strong surviving and the gentle crushed
- The "ruthless Darwinian world" Hardy builds around his heroine is this book translated into a human tragedy
- Darwin's struggle for existence echoes through Dostoevsky's last novel — he was conversant enough with the theory to concede 'man's descent from the ape'
- Scholars trace the novel's 'viper will eat viper' imagery and the Grand Inquisitor's animal-versus-moral vision of man straight back to Origin of Species
- The book that made man a competing organism is one of the things Dostoevsky's faith is wrestling with
- Darwin's Origin was one of the books that pulled the young Freud into science — he bought the German editions early and called "Darwin's doctrine, then in vogue," a powerful attraction
- The move it teaches is the one Freud would carry into the mind: human beings are continuous with their animal past, driven by forces below the surface, not above it
- The Interpretation of Dreams takes that frame and turns it inward, mapping the buried life of the psyche the way Darwin mapped the buried history of the species
Portraits
Cameron's 1868 close-up of the bearded Darwin against black — the soft-focus art photograph Darwin's family thought the best ever taken of him; the patriarch-sage image that fixed his public face.
Julia Margaret Cameron, 1868
Barraud's 1881 portrait, considered by some scholars the last photograph taken of Darwin — the white-bearded face in three-quarter view from his final year.
Herbert Rose Barraud, 1881
Famous Quotes
“Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.”
“These facts seemed to me to throw some light on the origin of species—that mystery of mysteries, as it has been called by one of our greatest philosophers.”
“This preservation of favourable variations and the rejection of injurious variations, I call Natural Selection.”
“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.”
About Charles Darwin
English naturalist whose 1859 On the Origin of Species established the theory of evolution by natural selection and reshaped the biological sciences. Darwin spent five years aboard HMS Beagle surveying South America and the Pacific before returning to a quiet life of scholarship at Down House in Kent. His careful, undogmatic prose is itself a model of nineteenth-century scientific writing.