Charles Darwin

Introduction

Charles Darwin (1809-1882) was an English naturalist, geologist and biologist. He was not a psychologist: he never held an academic post, never taught a class, never belonged to a psychological society, and never described himself as one. Readers who arrive at a psychology site expecting a clinician or an experimentalist will not find one here. What they will find instead is harder to overstate, because three of Darwin's later books did more to set the agenda of psychology than the work of most men who actually carried the title.

Darwin was born on 12 February 1809 in Shrewsbury, Shropshire, and died on 19 April 1882 at his home, Down House, in the village of Downe, Kent; he was buried in Westminster Abbey a week later. His scientific reputation rests on On the Origin of Species (1859) and the theory of evolution by natural selection. His psychological relevance rests on three later works: The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871), which argued for continuity between human and animal minds; The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), an early attempt to treat emotion as a biological phenomenon with a natural history; and a short 1877 paper in the journal Mind, "A Biographical Sketch of an Infant," which helped launch the systematic study of child development. Each of them, and each in a different way, has also been the target of sustained modern criticism.

Early Life and Education

Darwin was born into a wealthy and intellectually formidable family. His father, Robert Waring Darwin, was a successful physician; his mother, Susannah, was the daughter of the pottery manufacturer Josiah Wedgwood; and his paternal grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, was a physician, poet and early evolutionary speculator whose writings circulated in the family library. Darwin's mother died in 1817, when he was eight, and he was largely raised by his older sisters.

Formal schooling did not suit him. He attended Shrewsbury School as a boarder from 1818 and found the classical curriculum dull. In October 1825 his father sent him, with his brother Erasmus, to the University of Edinburgh to study medicine. The experiment failed: Darwin found the lectures tedious, was distressed by surgery performed without anaesthesia, and spent his time instead on natural history, collecting marine invertebrates along the Firth of Forth and learning taxidermy. He abandoned medicine in 1827 without a degree.

His father then redirected him toward the clergy. Darwin entered Christ's College, Cambridge, in October 1827 and took his BA in January 1831, having read for the ordinary degree rather than honours. Cambridge mattered to him far less for the divinity syllabus than for the botanist John Stevens Henslow, whose lectures he attended and with whom he walked and talked constantly; Henslow became the closest thing Darwin had to a scientific mentor. He also studied geology with Adam Sedgwick. Immediately after graduating, and on Henslow's recommendation, he was offered an unpaid place as gentleman naturalist and companion to Captain Robert FitzRoy aboard HMS Beagle.

Academic and Professional Career

The Beagle sailed on 27 December 1831 and returned on 2 October 1836. Darwin was on board for nearly five years, though he spent about eighteen months of that time ashore, riding inland while the ship conducted its survey work. In South America he excavated fossils of extinct giant mammals, experienced an earthquake in Chile, and crossed the Andes; in the Galapagos he collected birds that the ornithologist John Gould later showed to be distinct species on different islands. Above all he read Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology and learned to think in terms of slow, cumulative change.

Returning to England in 1836, Darwin settled in London, published his Journal of Researches (later known as The Voyage of the Beagle), married his cousin Emma Wedgwood in January 1839, and began the secret notebooks on transmutation that led him to natural selection in 1838. Chronic ill health, which troubled him for the rest of his life and whose cause is still debated, drove the family out of London to Down House in 1842. There he lived as a private gentleman scientist, raising ten children and working at his own pace.

From 1846 to 1854 he devoted himself to a monographic study of barnacles, still regarded as a foundational taxonomic work. In 1858 a letter from Alfred Russel Wallace, enclosing an essay that independently outlined natural selection, forced his hand; the two men's papers were read jointly to the Linnean Society that July, and On the Origin of Species followed in November 1859. Darwin then turned explicitly to human beings: The Descent of Man appeared in 1871 and The Expression of the Emotions in 1872. His last years produced a series of botanical books and, in 1881, The Formation of Vegetable Mould, through the Action of Worms.

Darwin's honours included the Royal Society's Royal Medal (1853), the Geological Society's Wollaston Medal (1859), the Royal Society's Copley Medal (1864), the Prussian Pour le Mérite (1867) and an honorary doctorate from Cambridge (1877). The omissions are as telling as the awards: when the Royal Society presented the Copley Medal, its president stated explicitly that the Council had not included On the Origin of Species in its assessment.

Major Contributions to Psychology

The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals

Published on 26 November 1872, Expression was conceived partly as a rebuttal of the anatomist Charles Bell, who had argued that human facial muscles were a special divine provision and that expression was therefore evidence of humanity's separate creation. Darwin argued the opposite: that human expressions are continuous with those of other animals, and that many of them are not under voluntary control.

He organised his material around three principles. First, serviceable associated habits: movements that were once useful in a specific context become habitually associated with a given state of mind and are performed even when no longer useful. Second, antithesis: opposite states of mind generate opposite bodily postures. Third, the direct action of the excited nervous system on the body, independent of the will and of habit.

Methodologically the book was genuinely novel for its time. Darwin drew on observations of his own children and of domestic animals, on photographs supplied by the French neurologist Duchenne de Boulogne, on the portraits of the Swedish photographer Oscar Rejlander, and on a circulated questionnaire answered by missionaries, colonial officials and travellers about how people in other parts of the world expressed emotion. It was also one of the first scientific books to carry photographs as illustrations. From all this Darwin concluded that the chief emotional expressions are the same throughout the world, and used that claim as evidence that the human races descend from a single stock, against the polygenist anthropology of his day.

The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex

The Descent of Man did two things that matter to psychology. It argued explicitly that the difference between human and animal minds is one of degree and not of kind, extending the same claim to the moral sense and to what Darwin called conscience. And it introduced sexual selection as a second evolutionary mechanism, divided into competition within one sex and choice exerted by the other, to explain traits such as the peacock's train and, in humans, physical and cultural differences between populations.

Darwin's chapter on the comparison of the mental powers of humans and the lower animals is often cited as the founding text of comparative psychology. It is also, as discussed below, the part of his writing that has aged worst.

A Biographical Sketch of an Infant

In 1877 the young journal Mind published a translation of an account of infant mental development by the French critic Hippolyte Taine. Darwin, prompted by it, retrieved a diary he had begun in 1839 on the birth of his first child, William, and published "A Biographical Sketch of an Infant" in the July number. He recorded, with dates, the first appearance of sneezing, yawning, stretching, sucking and screaming; the withdrawal of the foot from a touch on day seven; the onset of fear and anger; the first laugh; and the gradual co-ordination of hand and eye. His inference was that the clumsiness of early voluntary movement reflects the immaturity of the "seat of the will" rather than of the muscles or the co-ordinating centres.

The paper was immediately noticed, translated into French, German and Russian within the year, and read by the German physiologist Wilhelm Preyer, who corresponded with Darwin about it and went on to publish Die Seele des Kindes in 1882. Preyer's systematic treatment, and the child-study movement that G. Stanley Hall built in the United States, gave developmental psychology its institutional footing; Darwin's paper is generally counted as the founding document of the "baby biography" genre that came before it.

Major Publications

Journal of Researches into the Geology and Natural History of the Various Countries Visited by HMS Beagle (1839)
The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs (1842)
On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859)
The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication (1868)
The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871)
The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872)
"A Biographical Sketch of an Infant," Mind 2 (1877): 285-294
The Formation of Vegetable Mould, through the Action of Worms (1881)

Impact and Legacy

Darwin's psychological legacy runs in two directions. On the one hand, Expression was neglected for most of the first half of the twentieth century, because the dominant view in the human sciences held that emotion was culturally constructed. Margaret Mead held that facial expressions vary as much as language, and the kinesicist Ray Birdwhistell argued that he had abandoned Darwin's position after finding cultures in which people smile when unhappy. On the other hand, from the mid-1960s Paul Ekman revived the Darwinian programme with cross-cultural photograph-judgement studies, including work with the Fore people of Papua New Guinea, and defended the universality of a specific set of expressions.

The criticisms are substantial and unresolved. Ekman himself, editing a modern edition of Expression, documented serious defects in Darwin's method: the anecdotes were not collected systematically, there is no way of knowing whether contrary cases were suppressed, and the letters to colonial informants were phrased as leading questions that invited the answer Darwin wanted. The linguist Anna Wierzbicka has argued that the entire enterprise is contaminated by reliance on English emotion words that have no equivalents elsewhere. More prominently, Lisa Feldman Barrett has argued that facial movements do not reliably reveal emotional states and that the Darwinian tradition has over-read the evidence. Ekman and Dacher Keltner replied that Darwin never claimed that all expressions are universal, only the specific set he studied, and pointed to the large literatures on spontaneous expression, on free-response labelling in rural India, and on the autonomic physiology accompanying those expressions. The dispute is live. One strand of it tests Darwin's claim directly rather than through labelling. Rachael Jack and colleagues generated 4,800 randomised dynamic facial animations, asked 15 Western Caucasian and 15 East Asian observers to categorise them, and reverse-correlated the movements with the responses to recover each culture's mental representation of the six basic expressions. The Western models separated into six distinct and emotionally homogeneous clusters, as the universality hypothesis predicts; the East Asian models overlapped, with little categorical structure, and signalled intensity earlier and more through the eye region — the pattern familiar from East Asian emoticons such as (^.^). The study appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2012, vol. 109, pp. 7241–7244) under the title "Facial expressions of emotion are not culturally universal," and it is the empirical counterpart to Barrett's argument.

The dispute has also left the laboratory. The European Union's AI Act (Regulation (EU) 2024/1689) prohibits, with effect from 2 February 2025, the placing on the market, putting into service or use of AI systems that infer emotions in the workplace or in educational institutions, subject to narrow medical and safety exceptions; the European Commission issued guidelines on the prohibition on 4 February 2025. The Act's recitals enumerate the emotions in question — happiness, sadness, anger, surprise, disgust, embarrassment, excitement, shame, contempt, satisfaction and amusement — and its stated rationale is that emotional expression varies widely across cultures and situations. Whatever one concludes about the science, a claim about the legibility of faces that descends from Expression is now, in the European Union, a regulated assumption rather than a free one.

The Descent of Man has drawn a different kind of attack. Darwin wrote there that "the chief distinction in the intellectual powers of the two sexes is shewn by man attaining to a higher eminence, in whatever he takes up" and concluded that "man has ultimately become superior to woman." In December 1881 the American women's-rights campaigner Caroline Kennard wrote to ask whether he really held that view. Darwin replied that there seemed to him "a great difficulty from the laws of inheritance" in women becoming men's intellectual equals. Kennard's retort was that women should be given the same environment and opportunities "before she be fairly judged, intellectually his inferior." The science journalist Angela Saini has documented how such passages, alongside the work of Darwin's cousin Francis Galton, hardened late-Victorian sexism into an apparently biological claim; similar criticism attaches to Darwin's language about "savage" and "civilised" races. Darwin's defenders note that he used the universality of expression as an anti-racist argument, explicitly rejecting the claim that Europeans had a separate and superior origin, and that his views were formed within a mid-Victorian framework he did not fully transcend.

Sexual selection attracted its own controversy. Wallace rejected female choice outright, and the mechanism languished for roughly a century before being rehabilitated in the 1970s. Darwin defended it to the end, writing in his last published scientific paper that after weighing every objection he still believed it to be true.

Darwin's working papers have also become far more accessible. The Darwin Online project reported in July 2025 that it had transcribed 795 further items in Darwin's private papers, taking the total number of transcribed documents past 10,000; in August 2025 it published a previously unpublished draft leaf from Descent of Man; and in November 2025 it issued the first fully transcribed and edited edition of Darwin's address book. None of this settles the arguments above, but it does mean that claims about what Darwin wrote and when he wrote it can now be checked against a much larger primary record than was available a decade ago.

Finally, Darwin is routinely invoked in debates he did not start. "Social Darwinism" was largely the creation of Herbert Spencer and others, and the eugenics movement was founded by Galton, not Darwin. But Darwin's own language gave his successors material, and acknowledging that is part of reading him honestly.

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References

Darwin, C. (1872). The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. John Murray.