← all shorts

Person

Charles Darwin

A portrait of an elderly man with white hair and a long white beard, dressed in formal attire, set against a dark background.

English naturalist (1809–1882) whose theory of evolution by natural selection, set out in On the Origin of Species in 1859, became the organising principle of modern biology. Darwin gathered evidence for common descent from comparative anatomy, embryology, fossils, biogeography, and domestic breeding. He paid particular attention to vestigial organs, which he treated as some of the cleanest signatures of evolutionary history written into living bodies.

Mentioned in 6 articles