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Questions to ask Charles Darwin

7 min read

Useful questions for Charles Darwin (1809 to 1882) follow his life in order: a dropped medical course, five years on HMS Beagle (1831 to 1836), the private notebooks where he worked out natural selection, twenty years of delay, Alfred Russel Wallace's letter of 1858, On the Origin of Species (1859), and his views on religion. Below are 26 questions by stage, what his letters and notebooks record, and sample answers in his words.

Darwin in one paragraph

Charles Robert Darwin was born in Shrewsbury on 12 February 1809, the date now marked as Darwin Day. He left medical studies at Edinburgh, went to Christ's College, Cambridge, to train for the Church, and in 1831 joined HMS Beagle as a gentleman naturalist. Back in England he married his cousin Emma Wedgwood in 1839, moved to Down House in Kent in 1842 and stayed there for forty years, often ill, writing books on evolution, barnacles, orchids, emotions and earthworms. He died on 19 April 1882 and was buried in Westminster Abbey.

Using these questions in a project

Darwin left an unusual amount of evidence: about 15,000 surviving letters, the Beagle diary, the private notebooks and an autobiography he wrote for his children. That means almost every question below has a documented answer, and a teacher will expect yours to match it. Pick one question from each stage for a short interview, or a whole stage for a deeper one. For a wax museum, the Galápagos and barnacle questions give the liveliest answers.

To practise, you can ask an AI recreation of Charles Darwin on Yuga by voice or text. It draws on his writings and the record but is not Darwin and can get things wrong; check its answers against the Darwin Correspondence Project before you use them.

Stage 1: school, Edinburgh and Cambridge

What the record says: in his Autobiography (written 1876) he says school taught him little, that he could not bear watching surgery without anaesthetic at Edinburgh, and that at Cambridge he spent more time collecting beetles and walking with the botanist John Stevens Henslow than studying theology. Henslow recommended him for the Beagle.

  1. Why did you leave medical school in Edinburgh?
  2. What did you learn from John Edmonstone, the freed slave who taught you to stuff birds?
  3. Why were you so keen on collecting beetles at Cambridge?
  4. How did your father react when you were offered a place on the Beagle?

Stage 2: the voyage of the Beagle

What the record says: the Beagle sailed from Plymouth on 27 December 1831 and returned on 2 October 1836. Darwin spent much of the time ashore in South America, found fossil giant mammals in Argentina, felt an earthquake in Chile in 1835, and spent five weeks in the Galápagos Islands that autumn. The mockingbirds he collected there, which differed from island to island, struck him more at the time than the finches did. His Journal of Researches (1839) describes the voyage, including his horror at slavery in Brazil.

  1. What was it like to be seasick for most of five years?
  2. What fossils did you dig up in Argentina, and what puzzled you about them?
  3. What did you notice about the mockingbirds on different Galápagos islands?
  4. Why did you argue with Captain FitzRoy about slavery?
  5. What did you think of the people of Tierra del Fuego?

Handle the last question with care: Darwin's descriptions of the Fuegians use the language of his time, and a good interview notes that rather than repeating it as fact.

Stage 3: the secret notebooks and the long delay

What the record says: in July 1837 he began his “transmutation” notebooks. In Notebook B he drew a small branching tree with the words “I think” above it. In September 1838 he read Thomas Malthus on population, which gave him the idea of a struggle in which favourable variations survive. He wrote a sketch in 1842 and a longer essay in 1844, then spent eight years (1846 to 1854) on barnacles. In January 1844 he told the botanist Joseph Hooker about his idea in a letter.

  1. What does the tree sketch with “I think” in your 1837 notebook mean?
  2. How did reading Malthus change your thinking?
  3. Why did you spend eight years on barnacles?
  4. Why did you wait about twenty years to publish?
  5. Who did you trust with your theory first, and why?

Stage 4: Wallace, the Origin and the arguments

What the record says: in June 1858 Darwin received a paper from Alfred Russel Wallace, working in the Malay Archipelago, that set out the same idea. Friends arranged for both men's work to be read at the Linnean Society on 1 July 1858. On the Origin of Species came out on 24 November 1859. Darwin did not attend the famous Oxford debate of 1860, where Thomas Huxley argued for him. He wrote The Descent of Man in 1871.

  1. How did you feel when Wallace's letter arrived?
  2. Was the 1858 arrangement fair to Wallace?
  3. Why did you leave humans almost entirely out of the Origin?
  4. Why did you let Huxley do your public arguing?
  5. Where did the phrase “survival of the fittest” come from?

On the last one: the phrase is Herbert Spencer's, from 1864. Darwin added it to the fifth edition of the Origin in 1869.

Stage 5: family, faith and Down House

What the record says: his daughter Annie died in 1851, aged ten, and he wrote a private memorial of her. Emma was a devout Christian and worried about his loss of faith; their letters on the subject survive. In 1879 he wrote that he had never been an atheist in the sense of denying God and that agnostic described his state of mind best. He worked to the end: his last book, on earthworms, came out in 1881.

  1. How did Annie's death change you?
  2. How did you and Emma talk about religion when you disagreed?
  3. Were you an atheist?
  4. What was a normal working day at Down House?
  5. Why write a whole book about earthworms?
  6. What did you hope your children would learn from your autobiography?
  7. Which of your books do you think matters most?

Sample answers in Darwin's own words

Q: Why did you write your autobiography?

“I have attempted to write the following account of myself, as if I were a dead man in another world looking back at my own life.”
Autobiography, written 1876, in The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, ed. Francis Darwin (1887), vol. I

Q: How did it feel to admit that species change?

“I am almost convinced (quite contrary to opinion I started with) that species are not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable.”
Letter to J. D. Hooker, 11 January 1844

Q: Why did you spend eight years on barnacles?

“I hate a Barnacle as no man ever did before, not even a Sailor in a slow-sailing ship.”
Letter to W. D. Fox, 24 October 1852

Q: Whose work did you most admire?

“Linnaeus and Cuvier have been my two gods, though in very different ways, but they were mere schoolboys to old Aristotle.”
Letter to William Ogle, 22 February 1882

Questions to avoid

Darwin did not know how inheritance worked. Gregor Mendel published his pea experiments in 1866, but there is no good evidence Darwin read them, and genes, chromosomes and DNA (1953) all came later. He also cannot judge how his ideas were used after him: the word eugenics was coined in 1883 by his half cousin Francis Galton, a year after Darwin died. Ask him instead what he thought caused variation; he had a theory, called pangenesis (1868), that turned out to be wrong, which makes a good honest question.

Where to read Darwin for free

The Darwin Correspondence Project at Cambridge University has published the full text of his letters online with notes. Darwin Online, run by John van Wyhe, has every edition of his books, the Beagle diary and the notebooks, with images of the originals. Down House in Kent, run by English Heritage, keeps his study as he left it. For a biography, Janet Browne's two volumes (1995 and 2002) are the standard.

Questions people ask

What are good questions to ask Charles Darwin?
Ask what he saw on the Galápagos Islands, what the “I think” sketch in his 1837 notebook means, why he waited twenty years to publish, how he felt when Wallace's letter arrived in 1858, why he left humans out of the Origin, and whether he believed in God. His letters and Autobiography answer all of them.
Why did Darwin wait so long to publish his theory?
He had the core idea by 1838 but published in 1859. In his Autobiography he says he wanted to gather overwhelming evidence; historians add that he feared the reaction, worried about upsetting his religious wife Emma, and spent years on barnacles. Wallace's letter of 1858 finally pushed him to publish.
Was Charles Darwin an atheist?
He said not. In a letter to John Fordyce of 7 May 1879 he wrote that he had never been an atheist in the sense of denying the existence of God, and that agnostic would be the most correct description of his state of mind, though his views varied.
When is Darwin Day?
Darwin Day is 12 February, his birthday. He was born on 12 February 1809 in Shrewsbury, the same day as Abraham Lincoln. Schools and museums use it for talks and events about evolution and the history of science.

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