It was discovered on 6 May 1967, by Argentine astronomers Carlos Cesco and Arnold Klemola at the El Leoncito's Yale–Columbia Southern Station of the Félix Aguilar Observatory in Argentina.
[3] In September 1991, a rotational lightcurve of Darwin was obtained from photometric observations by Polish astronomer Wiesław Wiśniewski.
[4][5][7][8] The Collaborative Asteroid Lightcurve Link adopts Pravec's revised WISE data, that is, an albedo of 0.2541 and a diameter of 5.02 kilometres with an absolute magnitude of 13.6.
[3][6] This minor planet was named in memory of English naturalist Charles Darwin (1809–1882), the first to establish the theory of evolution by natural selection.
[2] The asteroid also honours George Darwin (1845–1912), his second son who was a noted astronomer for his pioneering application of detailed dynamical analyses to problems of cosmogony and geology.