Who was Charles Darwin?
Charles Darwin was an English naturalist born in 1809 and considered the father of the theory of evolution. At the end of the year 1831, before turning 23 years of age, Darwin embarked as volunteer scientist on the ship the Beagle for a five year expedition to the South American coast and the Pacific. During the voyage, whose most famous passage was the stop in the Galapagos Islands, Darwin collected data that he used to write his masterpiece “The Origin of Species” (1859). In this book the principles of the common ancestry of all living beings and of natural selection as the force that drives the diversity of species were described. Darwin died in 1882. (The original name of the most famous book written by Darwin was “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection”.)