And he even intended to be a priest and help the poor

Charles Darwin sums up his life in a biography, which has now been published in Hebrew by Rasling Publishing, translated by Yikki Manschenfreund and scientifically edited by Dr. Oren Herman. Run to book week and buy

Charles Darwin, perhaps the most humble scientist who made the most important discovery in human history, approached to summarize his life, precisely as a result of the face of a German journalist, but he was enthusiastic about it because he thought that in this way he could convey a message to future generations of his family, and therefore he approached in 1876, to write the His autobiography and he continued to rewrite it for the next 11 years, until the day he died.

It turns out that the path of this composition was not easy either, and in fact the biography was published in its entirety almost a hundred years later, in 1958. In particular, these were the chapters in which he dealt with his views on religion - which his pious wife Emma refused to publish in the first edition of the biography published in 1882, no less than five full years after his death. We learn these interesting details from the translator's introduction.

In the first chapters, Darwin makes sure to remember as many details as possible from his distant childhood, although he hardly remembers his mother even though she died when he was over eight years old. He remembers his father as a successful doctor, but not as a great scientist, he knew how to listen to patients and help them but did not try to find any legality. In the meantime, we enter the medical world of the 19th century and understand why life expectancy was so low.

Darwin loved to hunt. It turns out that the man who discovered the laws of nature liked to fish and hunt birds for fun, another absurdity. He does not remember the school and the university fondly as the place where his soul was formed. the intellectual. However, even as a child he liked to collect shells, plants and more and classified them.

After he withdrew from his medical studies at the University of Edinburgh, because he was unable to observe an operation which was then performed as was customary without anesthesia. His father enrolled him to study as a teacher at the University of Cambridge and on page 37 we find the following quote: "In light of the multiple attacks on me by the clergy, it seems ridiculous that I ever intended to become a priest. I never consciously gave up this intention and neither did my father give up the ambition, but both died naturally when I left Cambridge and joined the crew of the ship "Beagle" as a naturalist."

In fact, clergy studies were the closest thing to general studies at that time and he liked to hear Henslow's lectures on botany, even though he did not study botany. "Hanslow took his students on field trips on foot or in carts to remote places or in barges down the river and lectured them about the rare plants and animals they saw. These trips were a lot of fun."

The beetles he lost

One of the familiar stories, which for some reason I always thought was an urban legend, turns out to be true. On page 41, Darwin talks about his love for collecting beetles during the Cambridge period. “It was only the passion for collecting, as I did not dissect the beetles, and only occasionally examined their external features compared to published descriptions, though I gave them names nonetheless. My father is an example of my passion: one day, when I was peeling old bark, I saw two rare beetles and caught each of them with one of my hands. Then I noticed a third beetle of a different species, which I was unable to lose, so I put the beetle in my right hand into my mouth. However, the beetle emitted some pungent substance that burned my tongue so that I had to spit it out and it was lost, and so was the third one."

The journey on the Beagle could also have ended before it began due to his father's refusal to finance Darwin, except on one condition - that he find someone respectable to advocate for this journey and convince him. It was his uncle who drove him 30 miles to a house in Shrewsbury and convinced his father, after an evening earlier, Darwin wrote a polite refusal letter to the organizers of the trip.

He leaves the description of the journey to the book he published immediately upon his return, "The Beagle's Journey", but he nevertheless describes in this book his murky relationship with Captain Fitzroy, who was a grumpy man and prone to anger. He says that he met Fitzroy only rarely after he returned home, for fear that he would hurt him unintentionally without the possibility of reconciliation, which indeed happened. Fitzroy also became over the years even more religious than he was at the time of the voyage and he treated Darwin coldly due to the publication of the book On the Origin of Species which he opposed.

The decline of private supervision

In the chapter that talks about religious belief, he says that when he was on board the Beagle he was devout in his religion and remembered that some of the officers laughed at him because he quoted the Bible as an indisputable authority regarding some moral issue, "but gradually I began to understand that the sleeping covenant - about the false stories of the world's history in which , about the story of the Tower of Babel, the rainbow as a divine sign, and the way in which it attributes to God the image of a vengeful tyrant - is no more reliable than the sacred books of the Hindus or the beliefs of barbarians.... I gradually came to the conclusion that only absolute proof would be sufficient for a sane person to believe in the miracles in which Christianity believes, that the more we know about the fixed laws of nature, the less and less probable the miracles seem; that people in that period were ignorant and gullible with almost inexhaustible information; that it cannot be proven that the Gospel books were written in conjunction with the events described in them;... From these reflections I began to lose my faith in Christianity as a divine revelation." In short, Darwin gradually lost his faith in private supervision of any kind.” By the way, he uses the rest of the chapter to refute Reverend Paley's teaching (the famous clock argument that appears in talkbacks to this day from Creationists, AB) even though he initially accepted it as the truth of the matter.

Later, Darwin describes the story of the origin of species, which was written non-stop for 20 years, the commercial success of the book, but also the credit he shared jointly with Alfred Russel Wallace who reached similar conclusions during a trip to Indonesia. and also about his personal life. In this way, this book serves as a complement to the recently published books in Hebrew "Annie's Box" by Randall Keynes (Darwin's great-grandson) published by Keter and translated by Hani Gilad; David Cowman's book "Darwin's Slow Evolution" published by Aryeh Nir and translated by Shunamit Lifshitz.