---
title: "Charles Darwin"
chunk: 12/12
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Darwin"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:06:05.516999+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

Darwin was a prolific writer. Even without the publication of his works on evolution, he would have had a considerable reputation as the author of The Voyage of the Beagle, as a geologist who had published extensively on South America and had solved the puzzle of the formation of coral atolls, and as a biologist who had published the definitive work on barnacles. While On the Origin of Species dominates perceptions of his work, The Descent of Man and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals had considerable impact, and his books on plants including The Power of Movement in Plants were innovative studies of great importance, as was his final work on The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms.

== Legacy and commemoration ==

As Alfred Russel Wallace put it, Darwin had "wrought a greater revolution in human thought within a quarter of a century than any man of our time – or perhaps any time", having "given us a new conception of the world of life, and a theory which is itself a powerful instrument of research; has shown us how to combine into one consistent whole the facts accumulated by all the separate classes of workers, and has thereby revolutionised the whole study of nature". The paleoanthropologist Trenton Holliday states that "Darwin is rightly considered to be the preeminent evolutionary scientist of all time". Ernst Mayr considered On the Origin of Species to be, second to the Bible, the second most important book in history with regards to its influence on human thought, and he considered the scientific revolution that Darwin's theory of evolution ushered in to be "perhaps the most fundamental of all the intellectual revolutions in the history of mankind".
By around 1880, most scientists were convinced of evolution as descent with modification, though few agreed with Darwin that natural selection "has been the main but not the exclusive means of modification". During "the eclipse of Darwinism" scientists explored alternative mechanisms. Then Ronald Fisher incorporated Mendelian genetics in The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection, leading to population genetics and the modern evolutionary synthesis, which continues to develop. Scientific discoveries have confirmed and validated Darwin's key insights. The biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky said that "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution."
Geographical features given his name include Darwin Sound and Mount Darwin, both named while he was on the Beagle voyage, and Darwin Harbour, named by his former shipmates on its next voyage, which eventually became the location of Darwin, the capital city of Australia's Northern Territory. Darwin's name was given, formally or informally, to numerous plants and animals, including many he had collected on the voyage. 
In 1908, the Linnean Society of London began awards of the Darwin–Wallace Medal, to mark fifty years from the joint reading on 1 July 1858 of papers by Darwin and Wallace publishing their theory. Further awards were made in 1958 and 2008; since 2010, the awards have been annual. Darwin College, a postgraduate college at Cambridge University founded in 1964, is named after the Darwin family. From 2000 to 2017, UK £10 banknotes issued by the Bank of England featured Darwin's portrait printed on the reverse, along with a hummingbird and HMS Beagle. Darwin's bicentennial was celebrated with a series of postage stamps in the United Kingdom.
The Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History has a bronze statue of Charles Darwin in its Deep Time Hall, which features Darwin seated on a bench with a notebook containing his "tree of life" sketch. The statue was sculpted by David Clendining and was installed as the centrepiece of the hall, which focuses on Darwinian evolution.

== See also ==

== Notes ==

== Citations ==

== Bibliography ==

== External links ==

"The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online". Retrieved 4 March 2024.
Works by Charles Darwin in eBook form at Standard Ebooks
Works by Charles Darwin at Project Gutenberg
Works by or about Charles Robert Darwin at the Internet Archive
Works by Charles Darwin at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks) 
The Complete Works of Charles Darwin Online – Darwin Online; Darwin's publications, private papers and bibliography, supplementary works including biographies, obituaries and reviews
Darwin Correspondence Project Full text and notes for complete correspondence to 1867, with summaries of all the rest, and pages of commentary
Darwin Manuscript Project
"Archival material relating to Charles Darwin". UK National Archives. 
View books owned and annotated by Charles Darwin at the online Biodiversity Heritage Library.
Works by Charles Darwin at the Biodiversity Heritage Library 
Digitised Darwin Manuscripts in Cambridge Digital Library
Portraits of Charles Darwin at the National Portrait Gallery, London 
Newspaper clippings about Charles Darwin in the 20th Century Press Archives of the ZBW
Charles Darwin in the British horticultural press – Occasional Papers from RHS Lindley Library, volume 3 July 2010
Scientific American, 29 April 1882, pp. 256, Obituary of Charles Darwin
Fieser, James; Dowden, Bradley (eds.). "Charles Darwin". Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. ISSN 2161-0002. OCLC 37741658.