Happiest at home with his notebooks and his microscope, he shunned the public eye. Controversy made him ill. This brilliant observer of nature kept his most original and revolutionary idea under wraps for decades. Yet today, two centuries after Charles Darwin’s birth, nearly everyone knows his name. What did Darwin do, and why does he still matter so much? 

Keenly observing nature in all its forms, from fossil sloths to mockingbirds, primroses to children, Darwin saw that we all are related. Every living thing shares an ancestry, he concluded, and the vast diversity of life on Earth results from processes at work over millions of years and still at work today. Darwin’s explanation for this great unfolding of life through time, the theory of evolution by natural selection, transformed our understanding of the living world.

EXHIBITION SECTIONS:

1. YOUNG NATURALIST Born in 1809 to a wealthy family in rural England, he spent hours watching birds and lying under the dining-room table, reading...

2. A LONG TRIP AROUND THE WORLD In 1831, Charles Darwin received an astounding invitation: to join the HMS Beagle as ship’s naturalist for a trip around the world...

3. LONDON: THE «TREE OF LIFE» TAKES SHAPE Within months of stepping off the deck of the Beagle, Darwin settled in London, the nerve center of Britain. Now on fire with the ambition to join the “real naturalists”...

4. THE WIDESPREAD EVIDENCE OF EVOLUTION, TODAY A century and a half ago, Charles Darwin offered the world a single, simple scientific explanation for the diversity of life on Earth: evolution by natural selection...

5. HUMAN EVOLUTION Like all other living things, humans have evolved, a process well documented by the fossil record...

6. ENDLESS FORMS MOST BEAUTIFUL AND MOST WONDERFUL The orchid plants that fill this room, members of a vast and ancient family, enchanted Darwin late in life and intrigue us still, more than a century later...