Darwin’s African Origins

The Genealogy Project, a five-year initiative backed by National Geographic and IBM, has traced the origins of the famous author of the Origins of Species to Africa.  Two centuries after his birth and using new technology to examine DNA collected from the great-grandson of the father of evolution

, the Genealogy Project allowed scientists to map Charles Darwin’s ancestry tracing his forebears to the first modern humans to leave Africa for the Middle East. The Vancouver Sun reports that Chris Darwin the descendant of the Scientist who provided his DNA for examination is a tour guide resident in Sydney. Genetic code is inherited through the Y chromosome from father to son, hence the younger Darwin shares genetic data with his famous progenitor.

Charles Robert Darwin (1809 – 1882) was a Naturalist who proposed in his book titled On the Origin of Species, the scientific theory that all species of life descended from common ancestors. His evolution theory was not accepted by the scientific community until after his death. In recognition of Darwin’s pre-eminence as a scientist, he was one of only five 19th-century UK non-royal personages to be honoured by a state funeral and was buried in Westminster Abbey, close to John Herschel and Isaac Newton.

Darwin was born in Shrewsbury, Shropshire, England on 12 February 1809. He was the fifth of six children of wealthy society doctor and financier Robert Darwin, and Susannah Darwin (née Wedgwood). Charles showed an interest in natural history at age eight and had trouble fitting into his Father’s career plans to follow in his footsteps as a doctor. At the University of Edinburgh Medical School, he found lectures dull and surgery distressing so he neglected his studies, causing his father to send him to Cambridge University’s Christ’s College to become an Anglican parson. There he encountered scholars who argued that adaptation reflects divine design in nature and God acting through the laws of nature.  Inspired, Darwin planned after graduation to study natural history in the tropics. Against his father’s wish, he joined a two-year self-funded voyage as a naturalist and companion to captain Robert FitzRoy on the HMS Beagle’s expedition to chart the coastline of South America. It was while on this voyage that the argument for his evolution theory became solidly formed.