• Charles Robert Darwin (1809-1882) was born on February 12, 1809.

• At the age of 16 (1825) he entered medical school in Edinburgh, Scotland.

• With this in mind, Charles enrolled at Christ’s College in Cambridge and graduated with honors
in 1831.

• Darwin was commissioned as a naturalist on the HMS Beagle which set sail on December 27,
1831, on a five year voyage.

• Darwin spent five weeks on the Galapagos Island, a group of volcanic islands 900 km off the
coast of Ecuador.

• By 1842, Darwin had developed the essence of his conclusions but delayed their publication
because of uncertainty about how they would be received.

• His ideas were eventually published before the Linnean Society in London in 1858, and On the
Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection was published in 1859 and revolutionized
biology.

• Darwin published five volumes on Zoology of the Beagle Voyage (1843), Fertilisation of Orchids
(1862), The Variation of Plants and Animals under Domestication (1873), The Descent of Man
(1871) , and numerous other works.

• On his return to England in 1836, Darwin worked diligently on the notes and specimens he had
collected and made new observations.

• Ideas of how change occurred began to develop on his voyage.

• They took on their final form after 1838 when he read an essay by Thomas Malthus (1766-1834)
entitled Essay on the Principle of Population.

• Both Wallace’s and Darwin’s papers were published in the Journal of the Proceedings of the
Linnean Society in 1858.

• Darwin then shortened a manuscript he had been working on since 1856 and published it as On
the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection in November 1859.