William Yarrell (1784–1856), friend and adviser to Charles Darwin

For 25 years, from 1831 into 1856, the English zoologist William Yarrell was both a friend and adviser to Charles Darwin. He was regarded by Darwin as a wise and eminent naturalist of the older generation. Yarrell was part of a small group of naturalists, including Leonard Jenyns and John Stevens Henslow, whose interests in ornithology, entomology and geology expanded over the years. Their knowledge helped to support publication of the results of the HMS Beagle voyage and to inform Darwin while he was developing his hypotheses on evolution before the publication of On the Origin of Species, first published in 1859.

Trans-Substantial Motion (Al-Harakah Al-Jawhariyyah) Toward a Holistic Evolutionary Theory Traditional Contribution to Islamic Philosophy of Science

The modern evolution theory which starts its growth in popu- larity from the phenomenal Darwin’s the Origin of Species published in 1859. Inspired by Malthus’s essay on human populations competing for limited resource, he found a clue for a theory to interpret the voluminous data he had collected on the H.M.S Beagle voyage wherein he served as a naturalist for five years. Darwin had noted the gradual changes in successive generations to the “natural selection” of heritable characteristics that contribute to survival. This paper elaborated the thesis of new species which comes into existence by variation and selection over a long period of time.

Charles Darwin

Anyone beginning to learn about Charles Darwin (b. 1809–d. 1882) will sooner or later need to reckon with the vast body of writings by him and about him. This bibliographic guide aims to help newcomers find their way to the best of classic and recent scholarship. As the major episodes and achievements of Darwin’s life organize the main part of this guide, it is well to start with a brief biographical sketch. Born and educated in the English town of Shrewsbury, Darwin attended Edinburgh University medical school and then Cambridge University, where he received clerical-scientific training. Next came five years traveling around the world aboard HMS Beagle (1831–1836), followed by several years of intense geological publishing and private theorizing from a base in London. It was in this period that Darwin developed many of his distinctive ideas about the evolution or, to use the vocabulary of the day, “transmutation” of species, including the two most important: that living and fossil species belong to a branching “tree of life;” and that much of the evolutionary change propelling the gradual growth of this tree is due to a process that Darwin called “natural selection.” The decades from 1842 to 1882, spent largely at Down House in Kent with his wife Emma and their ever more numerous children, were immensely productive, domestically contented, physically trying (due to a mysterious illness), and—after the publication of the Origin of Species in 1859—scientifically controversial. From start to finish, it was a life of great privilege. Darwin’s grandfathers were the pottery magnate Josiah Wedgwood and the physician, poet, and scientific (indeed evolutionary) thinker Erasmus Darwin. In an era when no one in Britain could study for a university science degree, young Charles received the best scientific education available, especially from the naturalist Robert Grant at Edinburgh and the geologist Adam Sedgwick and botanist John Stevens Henslow at Cambridge. Darwin’s costs on the Beagle voyage were covered courtesy of his wealthy father, Robert. On returning from the voyage, Darwin moved easily among the London scientific elite, becoming close with Charles Lyell, whose books on gradualist geology Darwin had absorbed. Nor did it hurt that, between Darwin family money and the Wedgwood family money that came with marriage to Emma (his first cousin), Darwin was very rich, leaving him free—when not undone by illness—to devote himself fully to his scientific pursuits.

Evolutionary Writings

‘Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.’ On topics ranging from intelligent design and climate change to the politics of gender and race, the evolutionary writings of Charles Darwin occupy a pivotal position in contemporary public debate. This volume brings together the key chapters of his most important and accessible books, including the Journal of Researches on the Beagle voyage (1845), the Origin of Species (1871), and the Descent of Man, along with the full text of his delightful autobiography. They are accompanied by generous selections of responses from Darwin’s nineteenth-century readers from across the world. More than anything, they give a keen sense of the controversial nature of Darwin’s ideas, and his position within Victorian debates about man’s place in nature. The wide-ranging introduction by James A. Secord, Director of the Darwin Correspondence Project, explores the global impact and origins of Darwin’s work and the reasons for its unparalleled significance today.