[Remark: The text below is an excerpt from: "Dead Famous Scientists and their Mind-blowing Experiments (p91-111)"] Charles Darwin and his Mysterious Monsters Charles Darwin discovered some monsters that changed the world and, though he wanted a quiet life, he caused more debate than any other scientist. Charles was born in Shrewsbury in 1809. His mother died when he was eight, so he was brought up by his sisters and his father Robert, who was a bit scary. Robert weighed 24 stone and became extremely shouty when roused. When he wasn't roused, however, he was great, and Charles and he got on just fine. Mostly. Robert once predicted: You care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and ratcatching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family. Charles himself was bit of a late developer ... In fact, one of his teachers said, 'The boy is entirely dull.' I may not be a doctor, but I'm cheap When he was 16, Charles's dad encouraged him: to try curing local people who couldn't afford a proper doctor and then sent him to Edinburgh University to learn to be a medic. (Charles's patients might possibly have been happier - not to say healthier - if he'd done the learning bit first.) Like Galileo, Charles wasn't impressed with medicine. He found the lectures dull, the subject boring and as for the operations he had to witness - all performed without anaesthetic - well, he just wasn't too keen, frankly. Practically everyone in Charles's house was ill a lot of the time, plus his dad was a medical doctor and his sister loved wearing an anti-cold mask of her own invention, so he'd probably had quite enough of medicine at home. So, like Galileo once again, the lectures he went to at the university were nothing to do with medicine - in his case, they were geological ones. He didn't quite dare tell his dad how much he hated medicine, but he did the next best thing and got his sisters to do it for him. His dad made a slight fuss but said he could be a clergyman instead if he liked. (In those days there were only a few respectable careers for gentlemen, such as medicine, the Church, the Army, the Navy, politics or law.) So, at 19, Charles went off to Cambridge University to study religion. Though he wasn't actually interested in it, at least he believed every word of the Bible, which was handy. Charles had fun at Cambridge, hunting and shooting animals and making friends. He made two sorts of friends: 'dissipated low-minded young men', with whom he got drunk, sung and shot things; and senior scientists, with whom he discussed science. One of his best buddies was the Professor of Biology, Henslow, who made Charles even keener on geology - he sent Charles off on a geological expedition to North Wales. While he was there, Charles also collected animals from tidal pools and tried to dissect them, much like Aristotle but a lot more messily since he wasn't too skilled at dissection. When Charles got home, he found an exciting letter waiting for him from Henslow, who said that there was a place available for a naturalist to take part in a scientific expedition on a ship called the Beagle. Despite having no scientific qualifications, there being no pay on offer, and the fact that he was a bit shy, Charles really wanted to go. But he wasn't sure his dad would approve. And he was quite right. However, his dad did say, 'If you can find any man of common sense who advises you to go I will give my consent.' Luckily, Charles knew just the chap - one of his dad's favourite people. [Section deleted] To boldly go ... On 27 December 1831 the voyage began, with Charles as scientific adviser. It was a bit like Star Trek - a long mission to exciting unknown places - with Charles as science officer instead of Mr Spock. The only differences were: Charles wasn't actually a scientist he was terribly seasick he didn't know how to do the Vulcan mind-meld. (Although he did have slightly pointy ears.) Charles also had a squidgy little nose. This put Captain Robert Fitzroy off him like a shot. Fitzroy was into noses and had a particularly nice one of his own. He thought you could tell all sorts of things about a person frorn the shape of their hose, and when he saw Charles's he smelt trouble. However, Charles had a brilliant time on his voyage, despite a great deal of seasickness and a few arguments with Fitzroy - mostly caused by having to share a tiny cabin with him for five years. [Section deleted] In 1835 the Beagle landed at the Galapagos Islands, which were covered in black sand, smelled like they'd been in the oven too long and were populated by giant tortoises which Charles liked to ride about on and then eat. (Charming, eh? But they were very yummy.) Charles found that each of the islands had its own variety of tortoise and finch. The finches' beaks were designed to cope with whatever lunch was on offer in each island - polite and delicate little beaks for dainty seeds, pointy pecky ones for squirmy worms, huge scary ones for heavy nuts. All very handy, and all very odd. According to the accepted view at the time, all animal species were created by God for ever. So God must have designed slightly different animals for each island ... ... which seemed a bit strange. [Section deleted] A logical love affair Charles didn't spend all his time thinking about biology. In 1837 he reckoned it was time to get married. Maybe. Being a good scientist, he drew up a list of pros and cons: Pros Kids, Constant companion, Companion - better than a dog, Home, & someone to take care of house, Charms of music & female chit-chat Friend in old age. Cons Less freedom to go where one liked, Forced to visit relatives, Expense & anxiety of children, Fatness & idleness, Anxiety & responsibility, Less money for books Terrible loss of time. Charles concluded that, theoretically speaking, he ought to find a wife and in 1839, just after being elected a Fellow. of the Royal Society, he married his cousin, Emma Wedgwood. Though a rather odd way to go about it, the marriage was successful and they had loads of kids. Charles and Emma moved to a house in London and had a busy social life - but not for long. By the autumn of 1839, Charles found he was getting very tired. Though only 30, from then on he was never. really well again- sometimes he was too ill to work for days. It's a mystery what this illness was, but on the whole people now think it was a psychological disorder. In 1842, Charles and Emma moved to Down House, in Downe on the Downs. Every other dead famous scientist had some institution in which they did and discussed a lot of their work - like Aristotle's Lyceum, Newton's Royal Society, and Faraday's Royal Institution. Charles didn't, but he turned his house and gardens into a research centre of his own: he even filled a greenhouse with flesh-eating plants. [Section deleted] In 1846 Charles had a little break from polishing his theory of evolution to do some work on barnacles, the nasty shelly things that stick to your bottom if you're a ship. Charles had found a weird type of South American burrowing barnacle and was soon fascinated by them. Eight years later (Charles was a terribly thorough bloke) it was back to evolution again, which he went on not publishing. As keen a collector as he'd been all his life, what Charles was collecting now was facts - facts to support his theory of evolution so that, if he ever did publish it, it would knock people's socks off. Finally, in 1856, he reckoned he'd collected enough facts to convince everyone that evolution was correct, and started to write a massive book about it, which was to be about three-quarters of a million words long - more than 20 times as long as this book. Two years later ... Wallace agreed, and they did, but no one much noticed the report anyway; Charles now really did think he ought to get on with it. During the next 13 months he rattled off 'On the Origin of Species by Natural Selection'. He didn't think it would do too well, so his publisher only printed 1250 copies, which sold out on the day of publication. It probably helped that Hooker and Lyell both supported it and the country's top zoologist, Thomas Huxley, wrote an enthusiastic review too. But then a lot of people got very cross ... Monkeying with the Bible Charles had carefully avoided saying anything specific about the evolution of human beings, but it didn't take a genius to get the point; if evolution was true, it must mean humans, like all other living things, were descended from some primitive creature or other. Most people assumed this creature was a monkey though Charles and other proper scientists k.."l.ew it wasn't - on the quiet, Charles thought people were descended from underwater octopus-snail kind of things. With big tails. [Section deleted] It wasn't just that Charles had overturned the idea that Adam and Eve were the remote grandad and granny of us all: he'd cast doubt on the Church's version of the Earth's history, too, by showing that it must be millions of years old, not 6000 or so as the Bible implied. Things all came to a head at a famous meeting in Oxford in 1860. Encouraged by Richard Owen, a particularly slippery bishop nicknamed Soapy Sam gave a speech rubbishing evolution and ending up asking, 'Is it through his grandfather or his grandmother that he claims descent from a monkey?' Charles, being ill at the time, wasn't there to defend himself, but his friend and fellow-scientist Thomas Huxley was. First, Huxley explained the theory in a convincing way and then he said: 'I'd rather be related to an ape than a bishop.' Which was so awfully shocking that a woman fainted. From then on, Huxley called himself Darwin's Bulldog, with a mission to stand up for evolution. This suited Charles fine - he didn't want a lot of debate, he just wanted to be left alone with his family, his research and his writing. He wrote lots of books, mostly really thick ones stuffed full of scientific theories and lots and lots oflovely observations he'd carefully collected. A shocking experiment Charles was friends with Michael Faraday, and used his electricity generator to give people electric shocks so that they pulled weird faces - all in the cause of science of course. It was part of the research for his latest book, The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals. His dog, Bob, helped a lot too; Charles would draw Bob when he was hungry, angry, happy, and so on. Charles discovered lots more too, like why plants move and the size of the smallest piece of meat a carnivorous plant can detect. (Which is one-millonth of a gram.) Pets without legs Charles's last book was all about earthworms. He loved them and had all sorts of fun giving them nice big stones to bury, going out at night to watch them do whatever worms do at night, putting them on the piano and playing his cello to them, even going to Stonehenge to see what they'd been up to for the last 4,000 years. He calculated that nearby worm populations on the Downs brought up 18 tons of earth per acre per year. Charles's study of worms showed the same general point that evolution did - that small changes can cause huge effects, given enough time. One thing that made Charles similar to Galileo and Newton is that he tried to use mathematics to check his theories. When people said worms were too puny to do all the amazing things Charles said they did, he did sums to prove they weren't. Unfortunately, like Faraday, he was a bit rubbish at maths, and made some basic mistakes in the books he spent so long writing but, also like Faraday, he was fully aware of the importance in science of testing theories and making predictions. Charles lived happily at Down House with his family, Bob and the worms for many years until, in 1882, he died after a heart attack. He was so dead famous by then that he was buried next to lsaac Newton in Westminster Abbey. Charles had changed the way people look at the Universe as much as lsaac had; from then on it was clear that the natural world wasn't a changeless one which had suddenly been created a few thousand years ago. He showed that it was constantly - though slowly - changing through time, as generation succeeded generation and slime turned into us. There was, however, a big gap in the theory of evolution, as Charles knew. In the Origin of Species he said, 'No one can say why the same peculiarity in different individuals ... is sometimes inherited and sometimes not so; why the child often reverts in certain characters to its grandfather ...' [Remarks: I added a few pro's and con's of marriage from Darwin Online (http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?viewtype=text&itemID=CUL-DAR210.8.2&pageseq=1) Photo of Emma and darwin from http://www.brainpickings.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/darwin_emma.jpg must have been copied from Wikipedia]