110 Fun Facts About Charles Darwin

In which town was Charles Darwin born?

Shrewsbury: at school there, his home chemistry experiments earned him the nickname 'Gas' and a public rebuke from the headmaster.

Both of Darwin's grandfathers were prominent campaigners for what?

Abolition of slavery: at Bahia in Brazil, Darwin argued with his captain, who defended slavery, and was briefly banished from the captain's table.

Darwin's grandfather Erasmus anticipated ideas of evolution and common descent in which 1794 work?

Zoonomia: this medical treatise suggested all warm-blooded animals may have arisen from 'one living filament'; Charles said it had no effect on him, yet allowed such early views may have favoured his own.

Where did Darwin first go to university, to study medicine?

Edinburgh: he rushed out of the only two operations he watched, in the days before anaesthetics, and neglected medicine for natural history.

Which skill did the young Darwin learn from John Edmonstone, who had travelled with explorer Charles Waterton?

Taxidermy: Darwin wrote home that lessons cost a guinea for an hour every day for two months, and he often lingered to talk with his teacher.

Which fancy birds did Darwin breed himself while gathering evidence for On the Origin of Species?

Pigeons: the book opens with their astonishing variety of breeds, all descended from the wild rock dove, to show what selection can do.

Darwin's father sent him to Christ's College, Cambridge in 1828 as the first step towards which career?

Country parson: his father chose the Church once Charles clearly didn't want to be a physician, and at the time Charles believed every word of the Bible.

What did members of the 'Glutton Club' that Darwin joined at Cambridge do?

Ate exotic birds and beasts: they tried hawk and bittern, but gave up after an old brown owl proved 'indescribable'.

On the Beagle voyage Darwin mistakenly ate which bird that he had intended to study?

The remains were salvaged and the smaller species was later named Rhea darwinii in his honour.

Darwin's second cousin William Darwin Fox introduced him to which hobby at Cambridge?

Beetle collecting: holding a beetle in each hand, he once popped one into his mouth to grab a third, and it squirted a fluid that burnt his tongue.

At Cambridge, Darwin was known to the dons as 'the man who walks with' which botany professor?

John Stevens Henslow: this mentor later proposed Darwin for the self-funded naturalist's place on HMS Beagle.

Cramming for his Cambridge finals, Darwin delighted in the logic of which theologian?

William Paley: Darwin later wrote that Paley's argument from design, once so conclusive to him, 'fails, now that the law of natural selection has been discovered'.

Just before the Beagle voyage, Darwin toured Wales mapping rock strata with which geologist?

Adam Sedgwick: the same mentor later told Darwin he had read On the Origin of Species 'with more pain than pleasure'.

Who was the captain of HMS Beagle on Darwin's voyage?

Robert FitzRoy: he wanted a gentleman companion rather than 'a mere collector', and in 1854 he founded what became the Met Office.

Who persuaded Darwin's reluctant father to let him join the Beagle, and to pay for it?

His uncle Josiah: Darwin had already written to refuse the offer when his uncle talked his father round.

While Darwin explored ashore, what was the Beagle's main task?

Charting coastlines: Darwin was told the voyage would last two years, but it lasted almost five.

Which book, a gift from the Beagle's captain, taught Darwin that land slowly rises and falls over immense time?

Principles of Geology: at his very first stop, in the Cape Verde islands, Darwin was already reading the rocks Lyell's way.

Darwin identified the giant Megatherium, found in Patagonia, as an extinct kind of what?

Ground sloth: following Cuvier, Darwin credited it with the bony armour he had found, though the plates came from Glyptodon, a giant armadillo relative.

Which anatomist described the fossil bones Darwin brought back from South America?

Richard Owen: he later became a fierce critic of Darwin's theory, and was shown wrong when he claimed human brains had parts missing in apes.

Which 1835 disaster in Chile, witnessed by Darwin, raised mussel beds still clinging to rocks above high tide?

An earthquake: when the Beagle reached Concepción soon afterwards, Darwin found the city in ruins.

Darwin explained coral atolls as reefs that kept growing while the islands they ringed were doing what?

Sinking: he worked the whole theory out on the west coast of South America, before he had ever seen a true coral reef.

Which Galapagos animals did the islands' vice-governor say he could trace to their home island with certainty?

Tortoises: yet Darwin failed to collect them properly, and the ones taken aboard were kept as food rather than for study.

Struck by Australia's strange animals, Darwin mused that it was almost as though what?

Two Creators had been at work: that evening he watched wild platypuses diving in a dry-country creek, and found stuffed ones gave no true idea of them.

At which Cornish port did the Beagle finally anchor on 2 October 1836?

Falmouth: from there Darwin headed home, and was soon hunting for experts to describe his collections.

Which ornithologist announced Darwin's Galapagos birds were twelve species of finch?

John Gould: Darwin had taken the birds for a mix of blackbirds, 'gros-beaks' and finches, and hadn't labelled his by island.

In 1838, reading which economist made it strike Darwin at once that favourable variations would tend to survive?

Thomas Malthus: his warning that unchecked human numbers double every twenty-five years showed Darwin how fierce the struggle for existence must be.

In his 1838 notes weighing up marriage, Darwin wrote that a wife would be 'better than a' what?

Dog: having decided in favour of marriage, he proposed to Emma that November.

What was the maiden name of Emma, the first cousin Darwin married in 1839?

Wedgwood: before the wedding, Emma wrote that honest doubts about religion cannot be a sin, but would be 'a painful void between us'.

In 1844 Darwin left his wife a 'most solemn and last request' to spend £400 on what if he died?

Publishing his theory: he had just finished a sketch of it, yet he waited more than a decade to publish it himself.

Down House, where Darwin lived from 1842 until his death, is in which county?

Kent: Darwin and Emma both preferred rural life, and moved there to escape London's coal smoke.

Telling Joseph Hooker about his theory in 1844, Darwin joked that it was 'like confessing a' what?

Murder: his 'crime' was admitting that species are not immutable, quite contrary to the opinion he had started with.

Which anonymously published 1844 best-seller drew wide interest in the transmutation of species?

Vestiges of Creation: Darwin thought its zoology 'far worse' than its geology, yet credited it with preparing the ground for views like his.

Which creatures did Darwin spend eight years classifying, work that helped win him the Royal Medal in 1853?

Barnacles: by the end he wrote, 'I hate a Barnacle as no man ever did before, not even a sailor in a slow-sailing ship.'

Darwin's treasured daughter who died in 1851 at the age of ten was called what?

Annie: in a private memoir Darwin wrote, 'We have lost the joy of the household, and the solace of our old age.'

In 1849 Darwin found relief from his illness through hydrotherapy at Dr James Gully's spa in which town?

Malvern: he was surprised to find the water cure helped, and ten years later he was taking it again at Ilkley when the Origin came out.

Which naturalist's essay on natural selection, sent from the island of Ternate, reached Darwin in June 1858?

Alfred Russel Wallace: shocked at being 'forestalled', Darwin sent the essay on to Lyell that same day.

The joint 1858 papers announcing natural selection were read to which learned body in London?

The Linnean Society: its president later said the year had brought none of 'those striking discoveries which at once revolutionize' a science.

Why did Darwin miss the July 1858 reading of his theory in London?

His infant son had just died: neither author attended, leaving the joint papers in the hands of Lyell and Hooker.

Which topic did On the Origin of Species, whose first printing sold out on day one, almost entirely avoid?

Human ancestry: he allowed himself a single hint, 'Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.'

Which publisher, arranged by Lyell, brought out On the Origin of Species?

John Murray: the editor Murray consulted urged a book of observations instead of the theory, but Darwin held firm to his plan.

Which word, the last in On the Origin of Species, was the only form of it in the first five editions?

Darwin first used the word 'evolution' in The Descent of Man in 1871 and only added it to the Origin's sixth edition in 1872.

Which supporter, on first reading the Origin, exclaimed how 'extremely stupid' he had been to miss the idea?

Thomas Huxley: he fought the public battles over the Origin while illness kept Darwin away.

Which bishop argued against Darwin at the famous 1860 Oxford evolution debate?

Samuel Wilberforce: he is said to have taunted his opponent by asking whether his descent from an ape came through his grandfather or grandmother.

Britain's highest scientific honour, awarded to Darwin in 1864, was which award?

The Copley Medal: it came only after an earlier nomination had failed, and the Society's president praised his geology rather than his Origin.

To explain an orchid's extraordinarily deep nectar spur, Darwin predicted an undiscovered moth living where?

Madagascar: 21 years after his death, just such a long-tongued moth was discovered there and named praedicta.

What was Darwin's unsuccessful hypothesis of heredity, published in his 1868 book, called?

Pangenesis: tests transfusing blood between different breeds of rabbits found no sign of the particles it said carried traits.

Which mechanism in The Descent of Man (1871) explains features like the peacock's plumage?

Sexual selection: in 1860 Darwin told Asa Gray that 'the sight of a feather in a peacock's tail, whenever I gaze at it, makes me sick!'

Which 1872 Darwin book did the photographer Oscar Rejlander help illustrate?

The Expression of the Emotions: to gather evidence, Darwin also circulated a questionnaire asking observers how people show their feelings.

Darwin's final book, published in 1881, was about the action of which creatures on the soil?

Worms: testing their hearing, he found they ignored a metal whistle, shouting and even the deepest notes of a bassoon.

In 1860, Darwin wrote that he cared more about which plant than 'the origin of all the species in the world'?

Sundew: his long series of experiments on it confirmed that plants can catch and digest insects.

In an 1871 letter to Hooker, Darwin suggested life may have begun in a 'warm little' what?

Pond: he added that today such matter 'would be instantly devoured or absorbed', which wouldn't have happened before life existed.

In an 1879 letter, which word did Darwin call 'the most correct description of my state of mind'?

Agnostic: in the same letter he insisted he had 'never been an atheist in the sense of denying the existence of a God'.

Which half-cousin of Darwin coined the word 'eugenics' in 1883?

Francis Galton: his half-cousin's On the Origin of Species turned him to the study of heredity.

Which philosopher coined the phrase 'survival of the fittest' after reading On the Origin of Species?

Herbert Spencer: Darwin adopted the phrase in the Origin's fifth edition, calling it 'more accurate' than his own term.

Darwin expected a grave in the village churchyard at Downe, but where was he actually buried?

Westminster Abbey: the Royal Society's president asked for the honour and was among his pall-bearers, and Darwin lies not far from Isaac Newton.

Above his first sketch of an evolutionary tree, in an 1837 notebook, Darwin wrote which two words?

I think: the branching-tree idea he sketched there later became the only illustration in On the Origin of Species.

What did the 1915 'Lady Hope Story' claim about Darwin?

He returned to Christianity on his sickbed: Darwin's children publicly rejected the story.

Alongside HMS Beagle, which bird appeared with Darwin on the Bank of England £10 note from 2000 to 2017?

A hummingbird: yet it was finches and mockingbirds, not hummingbirds, that helped spur his ideas.

The city of Darwin, named after the naturalist, is the capital of which part of Australia?

Northern Territory: in 1839 the Beagle's crew named its harbour Port Darwin after their former shipmate.

Which Fuegian, taken home on the Beagle, later declined an offer to return to England?

Jemmy Button: Darwin put his choice down to the arrival of his 'young and nice-looking wife'.

Which feature of Charles Darwin's face nearly cost him his Beagle berth, because the captain judged character by it?

His nose, the captain thought, was that of a man without the energy and determination for a long voyage. Darwin wrote that the captain was afterwards well satisfied it had 'spoken falsely'.

Which novelist took Charles Darwin's place on the back of the Bank of England £10 note in 2017?

Jane Austen was chosen after a campaign to keep a woman on the back of a banknote, sparked by news that Elizabeth Fry would give way to Winston Churchill on the £5 note.

Skandar Keynes, a great-great-great-grandson of Charles Darwin, played Edmund Pevensie in which fantasy film series?

The Chronicles of Narnia producers picked him from some 2,000 young hopefuls, and he later left acting to become a political adviser.

Which affliction plagued Charles Darwin on HMS Beagle for years, though he filled notebooks on board regardless?

Seasickness laid him low at sea, but of the voyage's almost five years he spent most on land, exploring and gathering specimens.

Which black Galapagos reptiles disgusted Charles Darwin, who recorded their nickname 'imps of darkness' in his diary?

Marine iguanas are the only modern lizards that forage in the sea, grazing on algae, yet Darwin dismissed them as disgusting and clumsy.

Which planet was the British lander Beagle 2, named after Charles Darwin's survey ship, sent to search for life in 2003?

Mars swallowed the probe without a signal on Christmas Day 2003. Orbiter images in 2015 showed it had landed safely, but its solar panels had not fully opened, blocking its antenna.

Which board game did Charles Darwin play with his wife Emma every evening, keeping a running score for years?

Backgammon followed dinner at Down House, two games a night, and Darwin took the keenest interest in the long-running tally of who had won more.

Which playwright's works did the elderly Charles Darwin confess he found so intolerably dull that they nauseated him?

William Shakespeare had delighted him as a schoolboy, but Darwin felt his mind had become a machine for grinding laws out of facts and had lost all taste for poetry.

Which 1925 Tennessee court case tried a schoolteacher for teaching Darwin's theory in defiance of a state law?

The Scopes trial ended with a $100 fine that was overturned on a technicality: the judge, not the jury, had set the amount.

The tongue-in-cheek Darwin Awards honour people who improve which thing by accidentally removing themselves from it?

The gene pool is the joke's target: winners must die or sterilise themselves through their own folly, and anyone who kills an innocent bystander is disqualified.

In which mountain range did Charles Darwin find fossil seashells high among the peaks, evidence the land had risen?

The Andes also held fossil trees that had once grown on a sand beach, more evidence for Darwin that the range had been heaved up from the sea.

With which South American horsemen did Charles Darwin ride across the Pampas, watching them hunt with bolas?

Gauchos took him far inland from Bahía Blanca and the Río Negro, rides on which he hunted fossils and heard tell of a rare bird he had yet to see.

Which monk's experiments on pea plants, unknown to Charles Darwin, later supplied the missing rules of inheritance?

Gregor Mendel grew and tested some 28,000 plants between 1856 and 1863, yet Darwin never knew of the paper that could have completed his theory.

Charles Darwin's father scolded his teenage son for caring only about shooting, dogs and catching which animals?

Rats rounded off a rebuke that ended with a prophecy: the boy would be a disgrace to himself and all his family.

Which carnivorous plant, native to the Carolinas, did Charles Darwin call one of the most wonderful in the world?

Venus flytrap won the praise for the rapidity and force of its movements, and Darwin gave it a chapter of its own in his 1875 book on insect-eating plants.

Charles Darwin's wife Emma, a gifted pianist, is said to have taken a few lessons from which composer?

Frédéric Chopin reputedly gave her two or three lessons, and she played well enough to be invited to perform for George IV's Mrs Fitzherbert.

Charles Darwin found fossils of Glyptodon, an extinct Ice Age giant related to which living South American mammal?

The armadillo was Darwin's own first guess: the fossil casing looked to him like an enormous version of the small creatures common on the same plains.

The peppered moth became a textbook case of natural selection when dark forms spread across trees blackened by what?

Factory soot hid the dark moths from predators during the Industrial Revolution, and once clean-air laws scrubbed the trees the pale form took over again.

The Galapagos Islands, where Charles Darwin spent five weeks in 1835, belong to which South American country?

Ecuador had annexed the islands only three years before the Beagle arrived, and Darwin knew them by English names such as Chatham Island.

Which honour was Charles Darwin denied, though Prince Albert backed him and three of his sons later received it?

A knighthood was recommended by the Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, after the Origin appeared, but the proposal met opposition and came to nothing.

Which sights at medical school so horrified the young Charles Darwin that he twice rushed from the room?

Live surgery in the 1820s meant no anaesthetic, and one of the two patients was a child. Darwin never went back, and the cases haunted him for years.

Which name did Charles Darwin give the gravel 'thinking path' he circled daily at Down House?

The Sandwalk ringed a strip of woodland he planted himself, and he counted his laps by kicking a flint from a heap each time he passed.

Charles Darwin's closest friend, the botanist Joseph Hooker, spent twenty years as director of which botanical garden?

Kew Gardens passed to Hooker from his own father, the previous director, and he lies buried beside him in a churchyard a short walk from its gates.

Which tropical illness, carried by the 'great black bug of the Pampas' that bit Darwin, may explain his ill health?

Chagas disease was first suggested in 1959, but the theory has a snag: Darwin's diary records no fever in the days after the 1835 bite.

Which parasitic insects, whose young eat caterpillars alive, made Charles Darwin doubt a kindly God designed nature?

Wasps of the ichneumon family paralyse a caterpillar as live food for their eggs, a cruelty Darwin could not square with an all-powerful, benevolent deity.

What did Charles Darwin soak in tanks of salt water for weeks to test whether plants could reach distant islands?

Seeds sat in brine for weeks, some in a great tank that Darwin packed with snow to mimic cold seas, before he planted them to see which would sprout.

Which son of Charles Darwin became a Cambridge astronomer and proposed that the Moon had split away from the Earth?

George trained as a barrister before turning to the tides, and his 1879 fission theory of the Moon's origin is long since discredited.

Which English composer of The Lark Ascending was a great-nephew of Charles Darwin through his mother's family?

Ralph Vaughan Williams was told by his mother, Darwin's niece, that whether the world was made in six days or far longer, it was equally wonderful either way.

Which Oxford biologist, author of The Selfish Gene, has been nicknamed 'Darwin's rottweiler' in the press?

Richard Dawkins earned the name for his combative defence of evolution, an echo of the 'bulldog' label worn by Darwin's fiercest Victorian champion.

Which Galapagos birds, differing from island to island, made Charles Darwin suspect that species were not fixed?

Mockingbirds from different islands differed so plainly that Darwin began noting where each was caught, a habit that paid off when he sorted his notes sailing home.

Which nickname did schoolmates give the young Charles Darwin for the chemistry experiments he ran with his brother?

Gas stuck once word got round that the brothers had a laboratory in a tool-house at home, and the headmaster publicly rebuked Charles for wasting his time on it.

Which poet's epic was the single book Charles Darwin always took on inland excursions from HMS Beagle?

John Milton's Paradise Lost was Darwin's chief favourite in his twenties, when he could carry only one volume ashore and never chose anything else.

Which Harvard botanist, sent an outline of natural selection in 1857, became Darwin's leading American champion?

Asa Gray held that evolution and religious faith could sit together, a case that readers found in his 1876 book Darwiniana.

In which Scottish valley did Charles Darwin wrongly explain the 'parallel roads' as ancient sea beaches?

Glen Roy's terraces proved to be the shorelines of a lake dammed by ice, and Darwin gave up his view, later calling the paper a great failure he was ashamed of.

Where does the male Darwin's frog, a species Charles Darwin discovered in Chile, carry his growing tadpoles?

In his vocal sac the tadpoles feed on their yolk and on secretions from the sac wall, staying put until they have changed into froglets.

Which group's sudden appearance in the fossil record did Charles Darwin call an 'abominable mystery' in a letter?

Flowering plants seemed to burst into variety in the Early Cretaceous, which sat badly with Darwin's view that evolution moves by slow, gradual steps.

Darwin's tubercle, a small bump that Charles Darwin described in The Descent of Man, is found on which part of the body?

The ear keeps the bump on its rim in some people, and Darwin read it as a relic of pointed-eared ancestors. He called it the Woolnerian tip, after the sculptor who first noticed it.

Which English actor played Charles Darwin in a 2009 biopic opposite his real-life wife, Jennifer Connelly?

Paul Bettany worked from a script based on a biography by Randal Keynes, with Benedict Cumberbatch in support as the botanist Joseph Hooker.

In The Descent of Man, on which continent did Charles Darwin predict our earliest forebears had lived?

Africa was his inference from living apes: the species closest to us are found there, so their homeland was the likeliest cradle. Rivals such as Ernst Haeckel bet on Asia.

Which American president was born on exactly the same day as Charles Darwin, 12 February 1809?

Abraham Lincoln was born in Kentucky on that very day, and some celebrants fold his birthday into their Darwin Day events.

A British £2 coin struck for Charles Darwin's 200th birthday shows him face to face with which animal?

A chimpanzee stares back at Darwin's profile on the 2009 coin, whose edge is inscribed with the title and date of his most famous book.

Which name is given to a Darwin Day meal where diners eat foods from as many biological groups as they can?

Phylum Feast meals were being held by scientists on 12 February at least as early as 1972, long before Darwin Day became an organised event.

Which professionals signed the letter behind Evolution Weekend, an event timed to fall near Charles Darwin's birthday?

Clergy of several faiths put their names to the Clergy Letter Project, started in 2004 by a biologist to show that religion and evolution need not be at odds.

In which American city was a bronze bust of Charles Darwin unveiled at a natural history museum on his 100th birthday?

New York's Academy of Sciences staged the 1909 ceremony at the American Museum of Natural History, marking fifty years since the Origin was published as well.

Which fossil hunter, the discoverer of 'Lucy', gave a Palo Alto group's first public Darwin Day lecture in 1995?

Donald Johanson gave the talk for a Palo Alto community group and Stanford students, the start of a celebration that the group went on to hold every year.

Charles Darwin was born on 12 February 1809 at his family's home, a house known by which name?

The Mount was the home of a wealthy doctor and financier, Robert Darwin, and Charles was the fifth of his six children.

Which royal, then Chancellor of Cambridge University, unveiled a bronze statue of the young Charles Darwin in 2009?

Prince Philip did the honours at Christ's College on Darwin's 200th birthday; the statue shows him aged 22 and was sculpted by a graduate of the college.

Which body part of Darwin's finches differs most from one Galapagos species to the next?

The beak varies in size and shape from species to species, each adapted to its own food source, which makes the group a classic case of adaptive radiation.

From which English naval port did HMS Beagle sail with Charles Darwin aboard on 27 December 1831?

Plymouth kept Darwin waiting for two months before the ship got away, a spell he remembered as the most miserable he ever spent.

Which game did Charles Darwin take up at Down House in 1859, saying it drove 'the horrid species' out of his head?

Billiards came with a table set up while he was correcting the chapters of his great book for the press, and he told a friend the game did him a deal of good.