Test Your Darwin I.Q.

He was on track to become a minister. This was after he showed no interest in becoming a medical doctor. He would have been a minister except that a proclivity for collecting beetles and a desire to travel the world got him a position on the H.M.S. Beagle. That trip changed the course of his life, and the course of history.

Emma Wedgwood was an heiress to the Wedgwood ceramics company. But she was also Charles Darwin’s first cousin. It was Emma, plus his failing health, that kept Darwin from venturing abroad ever again. Young Charles was quite taken with Emma. They had ten children.

Despite what critics have been saying for 150 years (none of whom have probably read the book), Darwin didn’t mention human evolution in On the Origin of Species. The closest he came was on the final page where he wrote "Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history."

That's it. He left the matter of human evolution to another, later book.

Darwin thought the Galapagos were terrible islands -- desolate and strange. He also was unaware of the differences among the finches until after he had collected specimens from several islands. He was helped by others in sorting out which finches came from which island.

All these are true, to some degree. The Beagle's name was eventually changed to WV7 (Watch Vessel 7). The name Beagle was then given to a steam-powered gunship, which was later sold to the Japanese Navy. This created a false rumor that Darwin’s ship was sold to Japan. By 1870 the aged and unseaworthy Beagle of Darwin’s youth was sold as scrap. Nothing remains of it.

When Darwin discovered that he’d inherit his father’s considerable fortune, it “was sufficient to check any strenuous effort to learn medicine," he later wrote. So his father sent him, at the age of 19, to Cambridge to study to become a minister of the Church of England.

Like many people and even many entire religions today, Darwin saw no conflict between his theory of evolution and the existence of God. As a young man he believed in a Christian God. Later, however, he described himself as agnostic - but not as a result of his work in science. On the contrary, it was the painful death of his 10-year-old daughter Anne that made him question the orthodox Christian concept of God. Agnostics hold that the existence of God and the ultimate cause of the universe are beyond the knowledge of humans. Interestingly, this was a rather new word, coined by none other than Darwin’s close friend Thomas Henry Huxley. People who have cast Darwin as anti-religion or an atheist just don't have the facts.

Darwin was not congratulated for his theory. In fact he was criticized and insulted for it even by some of his own former professors.  Darwin’s theory was so revolutionary and controversial that it took some time for it to soak into even the best scientific minds of the time. It wasn’t the first difficult paradigm shift in science, and it won’t be the last. Scientists are human, after all.  Change is hard.

Darwin was not a combative person. In fact he was a gentle fellow who was also in poor health, perhaps from a parasite he picked up in South America. He was terribly surprised by the ferocity with which his theory was attacked. It was his friend, the young and brilliant zoologist Thomas Henry Huxley, who led the defense of Darwin and his theory, earning Huxley the nickname “Darwin’s Bulldog.”