Portrait painting of Charles Darwin in a blue tunic and brown jacket with brown hair and folded hands.

Darwin in Scotland

February 12, 2025

Our Charity

This Darwin Day, we’re sharing a shamelessly Scotland-centric tale of the great scientist’s student years in Edinburgh, which prove that there are many paths to achievement!

Every year on Charles Darwin’s birthday, humanists and others around the world celebrate his contributions to science and to non-religious understandings of human and animal life.

Darwin enrolled at Edinburgh University as a medical student in 1825, when he was just 16. At that time, Edinburgh was a centre of enlightenment thought and advances in the sciences of healing. (It was also rife with body-snatching, of the kind made infamous by Burke and Hare.) He was frequently frustrated there. In a series of letters to his father Darwin gave withering assessments of his lectures: “I dislike his lectures so much that I cannot speak with decency about them.” Etcetera.

Some of Darwin’s lectures were on geology and zoology, two subjects he would later transform beyond all measure. But he found these so boring that “the sole effect they produced on me was the determination never as long as I lived to read a book on Geology or in any way to study the science.”

Time was spent instead in the library and museum (now the Talbot Rice Gallery). Darwin also joined various societies, studied marine invertebrates on the shores of the Firth, and took lessons in taxidermy from a former enslaved person, John Edmonstone. In 1827 he left without graduating and later got a degree from Cambridge to become a clergyman.

But before he could take orders he was invited to circumnavigate the globe as a companion to Captain Fitzroy on the HMS Beagle. It was on this voyage that he began to formulate the theory of evolution that would fundamentally shift human beings’ understanding of the universe.

So, here’s to Charles Darwin, grumpy student and university dropout. It takes all sorts to change the world…

Support our campaign work, make a donation today

Our campaign work is funded by the generous support of our members and supporters. Support our campaign work and help to create a fairer Scotland and world.

Find out more

Donate now

Cartoon showing a person dropping a coin into a collection box.

Join us!

Your membership will help to fund our campaign work to make Scotland a more secular, rational, and socially just country, and to ensure everyone in Scotland has access to humanist ceremonies to mark important life events.

Find out more

Join now