A friend of mine, on Darwin’s birthday (February 12), would dress up in Victorian attire as a young Charles Darwin, enter his high school biology classroom, and announce that he was the “father of evolution.”  

This is a drawing of Charles Darwin at the time of the Voyage of Beagle. My teacher friend used this drawing to create an attire to dress as Darwin on his birthday.

Then, he pulled out his iphone, and i-clicked through a series of pictures of the trip Darwin had taken aboard a ship called the Beagle from 1831 – 1836!  At the beginning of the Voyage of Beagle, he hadn’t even begun his research which would lead to his theory of natural selection, and he explained this to the students in class.

The teacher then opened a large box, and carefully lifted out a beautifully crafted wood box, which he called his writing slope.  He smiled, and informed the students that back then, this was his lap top!  He opened the writing slope, and showed the students the large slope that he would write on, and then he opened one of the panels, and lifted out a book, which was one of the 15 journal-type books (field notebooks) that Darwin recorded his observations, drawings, and thoughts about his voyage around the world, but especially the coastline of South America.  The teacher then explained that 15 field notebooks, were used by Darwin to write the popular book which was published as Journal of Researchers into the Natural History and Geology of the Countries Visited During the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle Round the World.  It later became known simply as The Voyage of the Beagle.  My teacher friend explains to his students that Darwin’s field-notebooks is one of the reasons he has them keep a journal of their thinking and reflections in biology class. 

When Darwin returned to England he had collected a massive number of fossils, and animals and plants, and he consulted experts, including zoologists, anatomists, and geologists to help him identify, classify and discuss his collections.  During this period of collaboration, Darwin worked on various books, including The Voyage of the Beagle, but also a series of geology publications, and sketched his ideas about species varieties, and how this might have happened.  Darwin was also an avid reader, and one of the publications he read was Malthus’s .  He is what happened as a result of reading this book, in Darwin’s words:

In October 1838, that is, fifteen months after I had begun my systematic enquiry, I happened to read for amusement Malthus on Population, and being well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence which everywhere goes on from long-continued observation of the habits of animals and plants, it at once struck me that under these circumstances favourable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavourable ones to be destroyed. The result of this would be the formation of new species. Here, then, I had at last got a theory by which to work..

And of course the theory that emerged for Darwin was natural selection. Here is how Darwin stated his theory (from his book, On the Origin of Species): 

As many more individuals of each species are born than can possibly survive; and as, consequently, there is a frequently recurring struggle for existence, it follows that any being, if it vary however slightly in any manner profitable to itself, under the complex and sometimes varying conditions of life, will have a better chance of surviving, and thus be naturally selected. From the strong principle of inheritance, any selected variety will tend to propagate its new and modified form. (Source: Charles Darwin, On the Origin of the Species).

My friend used this information to tell a story about Charles Darwin, hoping this might bring the students closer to an understanding about the nature of science, and how ideas come about.  In Darwin’s case, the story told so far in this post is extremely incomplete, but I encourage you to use it to develop your own story with your students. 

You might ask a colleague to dress as Alfred Russell Wallace, and include him in on a discussion of the co-discovery of the theory of evolution by means of natural selection.

You might want to dress as Charles Darwin as he looked later in life.