The Voyage After the Beagle

In this episode, we travel to London to follow the story of Charles Darwin in the years between his return to England following his trip around the world on the HMS Beagle and his publication, along with Alfred Russel Wallace, of the theory of natural selection. We'll see for ourselves some of the observations he made of fossil mammals, now on display in the Natural History Museum, that first got him thinking about evolution. We'll travel to the small village of Downe, where Darwin would spend decades testing and fine tuning his hypothesis into one of science's most important theories. We'll end with a visit to the Linnean Society, where Darwin and Wallace presented their findings and where we can see how the ideas they developed remain at the heart of biological research today.