Charles Darwin was born in Shropshire, England, in 1809, into a large family. His father was a well-known physician, and the family lived in a beautiful house. Darwin preferred living in a large tree in the back yard. Darwin’s was a family of freethinkers. The other families charged their children for their thoughts.
Darwin’s father was a corpulent man, yet he survived his siblings by more than a decade. This led young Charles to formulate his original theory, “survival of the fattest”—which he quickly abandoned, after receiving a beating from his father, who discovered Charles’s writings under the boy’s pillow.
Charles Darwin was extremely methodical. Even in grade school, he ate his alphabet soup in order. One day, he found that the “N” was missing and was unable to finish his lunch.
In Sunday school, he once submitted an essay that contained glimmers of his future theories of evolution. The teacher gave him a failing grade because he couldn’t accept Darwin’s assertion that the Pope had evolved from a mouse, even though the pontiff looked very much like one.
Being a very shy young man, Darwin did not date much, but once a girl asked him out to dinner, and he accepted. After their meal, she invited him to her residence, where she removed all of her clothes. Darwin instantly took out his pen and pad and excitedly drew her jawbone, after which he counted her teeth and ribs.
Darwin rejected his father’s wish that he become a doctor or a preacher, being more inclined to study natural history. After finishing his studies, in 1831, he was put under the command of Captain Robert FitzRoy to travel, as a naturalist, to the Galápagos Islands aboard a ship called the Beagle. The ship was originally named the Bagel, as it was chartered from a Romanian baker, but Darwin asked that it be rechristened, because he didn’t want to set sail on a ship whose insignia had a hole in it.
By this time, Darwin was engaged to be married to his cousin, Emma Wedgwood, but he did not tell her that he was going on a voyage to the Galápagos Islands because she was very possessive and would have told him not to go. Instead, he secretly packed his bags and told her he was going out to buy some milk. When he returned, some five and a half years later, Emma looked at him angrily and said, “Charles, where’s the milk?”
Darwin mostly got along with Captain FitzRoy, but he did not like it when the captain called him Chuck. “Don’t call me Chuck,” he told the captain. “Chuck is a cut of meat, taken from the shoulder of a cow, composed of hard muscles and thick tendons, where the shoulder bones form a seven if viewed in cross section. Is that clear, Captain Lamb Chop?”
One day, a member of the crew found a fossil buried on the island with two sets of sexual characteristics in it, both male and female. The crew member asked, “What should we call it?” And Darwin, having had no contact with a female for five years, responded, “Fortunate.”
It was during this time that Darwin postulated the theory that adaptation was the way a species survived. One example: early humans developed a bulbous lower lip to allow them to whistle to attract women—and to eat spaghetti.
On a trip to another island, Darwin encountered a tribe whose members wore hats twenty-four hours a day. He discovered that this was not for any ceremonial purpose, but because the tribe had no appellation for the word “remove.”
It was during this time that Darwin formulated the theory of natural selection: there were green beetles and brown beetles. The brown were chosen by birds to be eaten, leaving the green beetles to proliferate. The brown beetles kept evolving and ultimately appeared, in 1964, with a different spelling, on “The Ed Sullivan Show.”
When he was back home, in England, Darwin heard that Alfred Russell Wallace had formulated theories quite similar to his own, and that Wallace was about to publish them. They met and agreed to co-publish, but, of the two, only Darwin became well known, primarily because, with his long beard, Darwin resembled Santa Claus.
The Darwins did not have a successful social life. After Charles’s book “The Formation of Vegetable Mold Through the Action of Worms” was published, he and his wife, Emma, were no longer invited to parties.
Darwin died on April 19, 1882, as a virtual recluse. At his bedside were only his wife, a few close friends, and an armadillo that rented a room in his basement.
