Born in Shrewsbury, England, Charles Darwin was the fifth child of Robert Darwin and Susannah Wedgewood. Being the child of a wealthy doctor and socialite mother, Darwin attended boarding school at Anglican Shrewsbury School beginning in 1818.

During the summer of 1825, Darwin helped his father as an apprentice doctor where he followed him into the poverty stricken area in Shropshire. He then went to Scotland to attend The University of Edinburgh where he planned to study medicine until he decided that surgery was far too brutal. During this time, he learned taxidermy from John Edmonstone who was a recently freed slave and later, his manuscript The Descent of Man would be based on much of what he thought he learned during his time with Edmonstone.

Darwin boarded the H.M.S. Beagle in 1831 and served there until 1836 as a naturalist. It was a science exhibition and exploration of the world. It was on this exhibition that Darwin collected plants and species that he would later use to create his own theories.

When Charles Darwin returned to London, he began piecing together everything he had collected and came up with four main principles to a theory that he felt was well documented with supporting evidence. This included his belief that evolution did occur though it was gradual and through a process known as natural selection. Still, it did occur through the process of speciation.

Darwin’s Theory of Evolution and his noted work of literary expression in The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection were based on his findings after traveling to various locations across the globe. He was the founding father, or credited with being so, of evolution and its concepts.

When Charles Darwin died rumors surrounded his deathbed. These rumors implied heavily that he had reverted back to Christianity and retracted his belief in evolution. Some Darwin family members adamantly denied the claim. Regardless of his final deathbed statements, Charles Darwin’s work in evolution will forever be remembered.