Charles Darwin was an English naturalist. He was born on February 12th 1809 (the same day in fact as the 16th US President, Abraham Lincoln), educated at Edinburgh and Cambridge Universities, and in the years 1831 to 1835 participated in a five year voyage around the world on the HMS Beagle. While Beagle's mission was to survey and chart coastlines, Darwin amassed a huge collection of natural history samples and studying the geology, botany and biology of the areas that the ship visited.

When Darwin returned to England, based in part on the samples he collected, he gradually developed his theory of evolution natural selection. Although the great age of the Earth and even evolutionary ideas (such as the idea that successive generations of organisms change over time and that one species can transmutate into another) were a commonplace among the scientific community, these ideas had not generally reached a wider public. This however changed in the 1840s when an anonymously published book (in fact written by the Scottish journalist, Robert Chambers), entitled "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation" introduced the public to these sorts of ideas and caused a storm of controversy.

Although Darwin considered the science in "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation" to be amateurish, he noted the storm of controversy caused by the book. As a result, he held back from publishing his own ideas, which included most crucially an explanation of the mechanism by which evolution occurs ("natural selection"), until he had amassed a mountain of evidence and argument in support of his thesis, as well as answers to all the likely objections.

Even then, Darwin held back from publishing, and eventually only did so when urged to by his friend, Sir Charles Lyell, who had become aware that Alfred Russel Wallace was working on similar lines to Darwin, and thought that Darwin ought to publish to establish priority. Darwin's ideas were first presented in a paper to the Linnean Society in a paper on July 1st, 1857 - it was read out by Lyell and Joseph Dalton Hooker, since Darwin was unable to attend due to the recent death of his infant son from scarlet fever. Then in 1859, Darwin published one of the most important books in the history of science, "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life" (usually referred to as just the "On the Origin of Species").

By S. Tanna. Discover more about Charles Darwin at http://www.dinosaurjungle.com/dinosaur_scientist_charlesdarwin.php