[2] George Darwin conducted studies into the prevalence and health outcomes of contemporary first-cousin marriages (such as his parents’) in Great Britain.

His father Charles had become concerned after the death of three of his children, including his favourite daughter, Annie, from tuberculosis in 1851, that his and Emma's union may have been a mistake from a biological perspective.

Subsequently, his efforts within geology caused him to stumble onto many seemingly radical ideas, some of which were related to the notion that preserved within the physical structure of the planet was the mechanical energy (or the collective inertial motion), which may have allowed an ancient rapidly spinning Earth to somehow expel a piece of its mass, and it was this expelled mass which later congealed to create the natural satellite that was now in orbit around the Earth.

So, before the Apollo mission and the rise to prominence of the relativistic notion that the origin of the Moon was due in part to collisions within a very active protoplanetary disk, there was a radically different depiction of lunar and planetary evolution, which was proposed by George Darwin, in 1879, called the Fission Theory.

"[13] As President of the Cambridge Philosophical Society, he also gave the Introductory Address to the Congress in 1912 on the character of pure and applied mathematics.

[14] He received the degree of Doctor mathematicae (honoris causa) from the Royal Frederick University in Oslo on 6 September 1902, when they celebrated the centennial of the birth of mathematician Niels Henrik Abel.