Charles Darwin

It is a cursed evil to any man to become as absorbed in any subject as I am in mine.

-Charles Darwin

PERHAPS no one has influenced our knowledge of life on Earth as much as the English naturalist Charles Darwin (1809-1882). His theory of evolution by natural selection, now the unifying theory of the life sciences, explained where all of the astonishingly diverse kinds of living things came from and how they became exquisitely adapted to their particular environments. His theory reconciled a host of diverse kinds of evidence such as the progressive fossil record, geographical distribution of species, recapitulative appearances in embryology, homologous structures, vestigial organs and nesting taxonomic relationships.