Charles Darwin (1809–1882)

Pence, Charles H. [UCL]

Charles Darwin is primarily known as the architect of the theory of evolution by natural selection. With the publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859, he advanced a view of the development of life on earth that profoundly shaped nearly all biological and much philosophical thought which followed. A number of prior authors had proposed that species were not static and were capable of change over time, but Darwin was the first to argue that a wide variety of features of the biological world could be simultaneously explained if all organisms were descended from a single common ancestor and modified by a process of adaptation to environmental conditions that Darwin christened “natural selection.”