Inception of Darwin's Theory - Background

Background

After his early life in a Unitarian family, Charles Darwin developed his interest in natural history. At Edinburgh University his work as a student of Robert Edmund Grant involved him in pioneering investigations of the ideas of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Erasmus Darwin on homology showing common descent, but he also saw how controversial and troubling such theories were. Robert Jameson's course taught Darwin stratigraphic geology, and closed with lectures on the "Origin of the Species of Animals". At Christ's College, Cambridge to qualify as an Anglican clergyman, Darwin became passionate about beetle collecting, then shone in John Stevens Henslow's botany course. He was convinced by Paley's Natural Theology which set out the Teleological argument that complexity of "design" in nature proved God's role as Creator, and by the views of Paley and John Herschel that creation was by laws which science could discover, not by intermittent miracles. The geology course of Adam Sedgwick and summer work mapping strata in Wales emphasised that life on earth went back over eons of time.

Then on his voyage on the Beagle Darwin became convinced by Charles Lyell's uniformitarian theory of gradual geological process, and puzzled over how various theories of creation fitted the evidence he saw.

In the third edition of On the Origin of Species Darwin provided a historical sketch of his predecessors in writing of descent with modification or natural selection, including those who he had only learned of after the 1859 publication of The Origin. His account essentially deals with 19th-century authors; "Passing over authors from the classical period to that of Buffon, with whose writings I am not familiar, Lamarck was the first man whose conclusions on this subject excited much attention." However, in a footnote he remarks on how his grandfather, Dr. Erasmus Darwin, Goethe and Geoffroy Saint Hilaire came to the same conclusion on the origin of species in the years 1794-5, anticipating Lamarck.

There is no direct evidence linking Darwin to Benjamin Franklin's treatise "Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, etc.." However, Franklin was a friend and colleague of both Erasmus and Robert Darwin, and it has been suggested that this work may have influenced Darwin's study of Malthus' belief on the relationship between population and subsistence.