Charles Darwin was born on this day in 1809. At 16 years old, he was booted from the boarding school he'd been enrolled in for being an unsuccessful student. The same year, he was enrolled at Edinburgh University to study medicine. He would end up leaving that institution, too, after watching surgery performed on a child — something he simply couldn't stomach. He pivoted, enrolling in a divinity school, even though his real passion was being out in nature.
As a young kid, he'd collected animal shells, minerals, and other tiny, interesting objects from the environment around him. As a teenager, he got into birdwatching, then hunting, and eventually taxidermy. Part of his studies focused on zoology and geology. All of those skills would come together in his research as an adult, especially when he joined the second voyage of the HMS Beagle. The ship set off from England and circled the globe, stopping by areas including the west coast of Africa, most of South America's coastline, and a couple of locations in the south of Australia. His work on the trip centered mostly on geology, but he also documented his zoological findings.
Half a year after he'd arrived back in England in 1836, he began theorizing that species can change over time based on the variety of types of animals he encountered on the many stops the Beagle had made. It would take another 23 years before he would publish his famed piece of scientific literature, "On the Origin of Species."
Of course, there's plenty more to say on what Darwin actually discovered and theorized, why it took so long to publish his theory, and what happened once it was out in the open — but this Off-script is already pretty long, so we'll try to get to those parts of his story in future issues of qAM.
In the interim, you can read a biography of Charles Darwin at the United Kingdom's Natural History Museum.
