Charles Darwin (1809-1882) was a British naturalist, who revolutionized the science of biology by his demonstration of evolution by natural selection. Darwin's On The Origin Of Species By Means Of Natural Selection, Or The Preservation Of Favoured Races In The Struggle Of Life, was published on November 24, 1859, and sold out immediately.

Darwin was born in Shrewsbury on 12 February 1809. In 1827 he started theology studies at Christ's College, Cambridge. His love to collect plants, insects, and geological specimens was noted by his botany professor John Stevens Henslow. He arranged for his talented student a place a on the surveying expedition of HMS Beagle to Patagonia. Despite the objections of his father, Darwin decided to leave his familiar surroundings.

The voyage took five years from 1831 to 1836. Darwin returned with observations he had made in Teneriffe, the Cape Verde Islands, Brazil, the Galapagos Islands, and elsewhere. During the voyage he had contracted a tropical illness, which made him a semi-invalid for the rest of his life. By 1846 Darwin had published several works based on the discoveries of the voyage and he became secretary of the Geological Society (1838-41).

From 1842 Darwin lived at Down House, Downe. In 1839 he had married his cousin Emma Wedgwood, and when not devoting himself to scientific studies, he led the life of a country gentleman. In the 1840s Darwin worked on his observations of the origin of species for his own use. He began to conclude, although he was deeply anxious about the direction his mind was taking, that species might share a common ancestor.

Darwin's great work, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection was heavily attacked because it did not support the depiction of creation given in the book of Genesis. Darwin's argument that natural selection - the mechanism of evolution - worked automatically, leaving little or no room for divine guidance or design. All species, he reasoned, produce far too many offspring for them all to survive, and therefore those with favorable variations - owing to chance - are selected.

At Darwin's hands evolution matured into a well-developed scientific theory, which have been a constant target of religious or pseudo-scientific attacks. However, Darwin himself did not at first explicitly apply the evolutionary theory to human beings. He knew that his challenge to the Biblical doctrine would cause stress to his friends and family, among them his religious wife.

However, T.H. Huxley published in his Man's Place in Nature (1863) an application of the theory and Darwin followed him in The Descent Of Man, And Selection In Relation To Sex (1871) and Expression Of Emotions In Man And Animals (1872), which showed the similarities between animals and man in the expression of emotions and was the start of the science of ethnology. Darwin's voyage with the Royal Navy's H.M.S. Beagle is recorded in the Journal Of Researches (1836), a blend of scientific reporting and travel writing.

Darwin died in Down, Kent, on April 19, 1882 and is buried in Westminster Abbey.