Erasmus Darwin House. This is the house where Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802),British physician and grandfather of Charles Darwin,lived from 1756 to 1781. Erasmus Darwin is best known as one of the founder members of the Lunar Society,where he composed many writings on science,some of which were in verse. Darwin's most famous work,Zoonomia (1796),briefly proposed a theory of evolution in response to environmental pressures,anticipating and foreshadowing the evolutionary ideas proposed later by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Charles Darwin. Photographed in Lichfield,Staffordshire,UK |