

However, Darwin’s friends and colleagues began a lobbying campaign to give him the high honor of burial inside London’s Westminster Abbey. Darwin is buried inside Westminster Abbey.Īfter Darwin passed away on April 19, 1882, his family began preparations to bury him in the village where he had spent the last 40 years of his life. Herbert Spencer of the survival of the fittest is more accurate, and is sometimes equally convenient.”ĩ. Darwin first adopted the phrase in his fifth edition of “The Origin of Species,” published in 1869, by writing of natural selection that “the expression often used by Mr. He didn’t coin the phrase “survival of the fittest.”Īlthough associated with Darwin’s theory of natural selection, the phrase “survival of the fittest” was actually first used by English philosopher Herbert Spencer in his 1864 “Principles of Biology” to connect his economic and sociological theories with Darwin’s biological concepts. While circumnavigating the globe on HMS Beagle, Darwin continued his adventurous eating by snacking on armadillo, ostrich and puma (“remarkably like veal in its taste,” he described).Ĩ. As a student at Cambridge, he formed the Gourmet Club, also known as the Glutton Club, for the purpose of dining on “birds and beasts, which were before unknown to human palate.” Darwin ate hawk and bittern but couldn’t choke down a brown owl that was served. He instead referred to himself as an agnostic.ĭarwin not only studied an eclectic menagerie of animals from around the globe, he ate them as well. Darwin, though, never characterized himself as an atheist. However, Darwin’s faith began to waver after encountering the evils of slavery on his trip around the world and following the deaths of three of his children. “I did not then in the least doubt the strict and literal truth of every word in the Bible,” he later wrote. He left medical school and dashed his father’s dreams.Īfter leaving the University of Edinburgh, the man who would challenge the established religious dogma of creationism enrolled at Cambridge to study theology. Darwin, however, hated the sight of blood and was bored with the lectures. After spending the summer of 1825 serving as an apprentice in his father’s practice, he entered one of Britain’s top medical schools at the University of Edinburgh. Darwin’s father was a successful doctor who groomed his son to follow in his footsteps.
