How Charles Darwin Inherited His World-shifting Ideas on Evolution

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BBefore Charles Darwin, there was Erasmus.

The English pioneer of evolutionary theory is said to have been inspired by his paternal grandfather Erasmus, whom he never had the chance to meet. Erasmus, who died seven years before Charles was born (on this day in 1809), was, among other specialties, a highly regarded poet, physician, and philosopher. But her influence on her grandson’s revolutionary ideas has only recently been revealed.

Erasmus was known as an excellent physician, even sought after by King George III, and he championed abolitionism and women’s suffrage. He probably became interested in evolution through his friend Josiah Wedgwood, an English potter and abolitionist who eventually became Charles Darwin’s maternal grandfather. Wedgwood sent Erasmus mammoth bones that had been dug up from a canal in England, and they did not appear to come from any known species. Erasmus was intrigued and wondered if they came from an extinct creature – a revelation that ultimately convinced him that all species evolve over time.

Erasmus went on to study domestic and wild animals and developed his extensive knowledge in areas such as paleontology, comparative anatomy and embryology. Around 1770, he sparked his first controversy with the coat of arms that he had painted on his carriage. It featured three scallop shells and a Latin phrase meaning “all from shells”, suggesting that life evolved from a single organism.

For his first notable foray into evolutionary theory, he alluded to his developing ideas in an erotic poem. In Plant lovespublished around 1789, it asserted that “a plant passion… was visible in a wide variety of erotic behavior in plants, from the chaste intercourse of a romantic plant pair, to the female parts of the plant entertaining several male suitors, to even wilder orgiastic fare,” wrote JP Daly of Stanford University.

At the time, botany was popular among the upper classes of England, so this work received much fanfare. In his poem, Erasmus drew on the taxonomic system of Carl Linnaeus and implied that sexual reproduction links humans and nature.

Read more: “The seeds that sowed a revolution”

Erasmus ultimately proposed one of the first formal theories of evolution in Zoonomicsa two-volume medical work published between 1794 and 1796. It suggested that the world had existed for well over 6,000 years, as was the popular belief at the time, and that all life on Earth came from a single origin. “Would it be too bold to imagine that since the beginning of Earth’s existence, perhaps millions of centuries before the beginning of human history, would it be too bold to imagine that all warm-blooded animals arose from a single living filament,” he wrote.

He also laid the foundation for the idea of ​​survival of the fittest, noting that all creatures encounter “three great objects of desire”: they must reproduce, eat, and stay safe, which triggered what his grandson called “sexual selection” a century later.

These ideas attracted condemnation and Erasmus was considered a heretic for questioning God and existing theories of creation. At the time, bloody revolutions like France’s were seen in connection with “the impiety of evolutionary ideas.” In the last years of Erasmus’s life, such criticism forced him to withdraw from public debate.

But Erasmus went even further with his last poem, The Temple of Naturepublished posthumously in 1803 — he died in 1802 at the age of 70. He describes the evolution of society, moving from hunting to agriculture via commerce and finally philosophy. Erasmus was quite ahead of his time, arguing that life evolved from the simplest microscopic forms to plants and animals. He also looked at the evolution of language in humans, which he believed allowed us to communicate and satisfy our needs.

Over the past decade, researchers have shed light on Erasmus’ overlooked impacts on his grandson. Although Charles denied this in public, it is now known that he read and probably developed Erasmus’ work. For example, Charles made more than two dozen annotations in The Temple of Nature and is also known to have read Zoonomics. Ultimately, the researchers highlighted “the enormous similarity between Charles Darwin’s evolutionary thinking and that of his grandfather,” suggesting that Erasmus played a long-overlooked role in the development of this world-defining school of thought.

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Main image: Wikimedia Commons

• Molly Glick

  Published on February 12, 2026

  Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.