On February 12, 1809 Darwin was born in Shrewsbury, England. His father Robert was a wealthy physician with one of the largest medical practices outside London. His paternal grandfather Erasmus was both a physician and a celebrated nature writer. Darwin as a young boy developed an interest in natural history but started his advanced schooling at Edinburgh in medicine, a subject he soon learned to detest. Later at Cambridge, where he went to prepare for a career in the clergy, he showed no interest in his theological studies, but became acquainted with a botany professor, the Rev. John Henslow, who was destined to become his mentor and to have a profound effect on his life. It was Henslow who encouraged Darwin, following his graduation from Cambridge, to take an extended sea voyage and exploration of the world outside of England.
1831 -1836 Voyage on the HMS Beagle - expedition naturalist and gentlemen's companion to Capt Robert FitzRoy. Circumnavigated the world, spending over 3 years of the 5 exploring the coastline, flora and fauna of southern South America.
1838 Put devises his theory of evolutionary change and the origin of species by a process of natural selection.
1839 Marries his cousin Emma Wedgewood. They had 10 children together, 7 surviving to adulthood, and lived a long and happy life together, untouched by the slightest hint of poverty or scandal. Darwin was plagued by a chronic illness.
1842 Expanded theory into a 35-page paper
1844 Expanded theory into a 230-page paper. After Darwin had written down his ides, he was stricken with bouts of bad health and several tragedies in his personal life.
1858 Receives a package from Indonesia in containing an essay written by the young English naturalist Alfred Russell Wallace containing an outline of a theory nearly identical to his own, which Wallace indicated was devised one night during a malarial fit.
1859 Origin of Species… was published when Darwin was 50 years old. It became an instant best seller -- and an instant source of controversy. Darwin talks much about pigeons, dogs, beetles, and other forms of life but says nothing of man.
June 1860 public debate held at Oxford, with more than 700 persons crowded into a lecture room, Darwin was conspicuously absent. It was his longtime friends and supporters Joseph Hooker and Darwin's bulldog Thomas Huxley who defended his views against the attacks of Admiral Robert FitzRoy, Richard Owen, and Soapy Sam Wilberforce, the Bishop of Oxford.
1871 His book The Descent of Man was published, in which he argued that humans were no different from all other forms of life, and that we too, in our evolutionary history, have been influenced by the forces of natural selection.
1872 In The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, he dared to claim that most of our refined and most particularly human behavior -- the expression of our emotions -- also reflected our evolutionary past.
April 19, 1882, at 73 years of age, he died at Down House, after several hours of nausea, intense vomiting and retching, symptoms of a chronic illness that bedeviled him for the last 40 years of his life. Darwin's last words, spoken to his wife Emma, "I am not in the least afraid to die."
April 26, 1892 Charles Darwin was laid to rest in Westminster Abbey in a fine polished coffin.
Altogether, Darwin wrote 14 books, in addition to 4 monographs on the taxonomy and biology of barnacles, and his narrative of the Voyage of the Beagle.
Shorted from:
http://www.public.coe.edu/departments/Biology/darwin_bio.html
Photo Credit:
http://thebeagleproject.blogspot.com/2008/06/time-to-eat-dogs.html
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Voyage_of_the_Beagle-it.png