ABSTRACT
Charles Robert Darwin was born on 12 February 1809 in Shrewsbury, England, fifth child of Robert Waring Darwin and Susannah Wedgwood. Being fit and athletic in his youth – he once felled a hare with a marble – he was gifted also with a capacity for close observation and had presented his first scientific paper at the age of seventeen on the larvae of the sea-mat Flustra. After an early focus on geology Darwin had, from 1837, begun to collect notes towards what he called his 'species theory' which was to culminate in the publication in 1859 of his most celebrated book The Origin of Species by Natural Selection. Many scientific objections were raised to Darwin's theory both immediately upon its publication and in subsequent years. Darwin's theory of natural selection, together with Gregor Mendel's work on genetics, which served to mitigate Fleeming Jenkin's objection, were synthesized to form what came to be known as 'neo-Darwinism'.
