  Charles Darwin was born February 12, 1809 and died April 18, 1882. It was a time of radical changes in British culture, and his family background put him in the midst of those changes. His grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, was a prosperous and highly respected physician living in Western England, south of Birmingham. He was also a philosophical radical, advocating Enlightenment ideas about human equality and liberty, including the liberty to think freely about the existence of God and about natural origins for the earth’s creatures. He wrote a number of very popular works of natural history, some in verse, in which he defended views about progress that included evolutionary speculations about the upward progress of living things from primordial beginnings.  