Erasmus Darwin

Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of Charles Darwin, was a leading intellectual of 18th century England. He was a respected physician, a well-known poet, philosopher, botanist, and naturalist. He formulated one of the first formal theories on evolution in Zoonomia, or, The Laws of Organic Life (1794-1796)("all vegetables and animals now living were originally derived from the smallest microscopic ones"), and he described the importance of sexual selection ("the final cause of this contest among males seems to be, that the strongest and most active animal should propagate the species, which should thence become improved"). In these ideas, he was influenced by the thinking of James Burnett, Lord Monboddo, and anticipated some of the views of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck.

Erasmus Darwin presented his evolutionary ideas in verse, in particular in The Temple of Nature

"Organic life beneath the shoreless waves

Was born and nurs'd in ocean's pearly caves;

First forms minute, unseen by spheric glass,

Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass;

These, as successive generations bloom,

New powers acquire and larger limbs assume;

Whence countless groups of vegetation spring,

And breathing realms of fin and feet and wing."

From The Temple of Nature. 1802.

His published works also include Phytologia (1800), a scientific discussion of agriculture and gardening.

Erasmus Darwin was born near Nottingham on December 12, 1731. He was educated at Cambridge and Edinburgh and settled first near Lichfield and later at Derby. Charles Darwin was his grandson.