Great People of the World
Charles Darwin
(Date of shooting unknown)
Charles Robert Darwin (1809-1882) English naturalist and author of the Origin of Species as an old man. He suggested that natural variation in a species creates a wide range of individual characteristics, some of which are more useful than others. The competition to survive in nature provides a driving force for evolution in the form of natural selection, a mechanism which weeds out those individuals possessing traits less suitable to the enviroment. The implications of his theory to man's own origins fuelled a bitter controversy with the christian orthodoxy.