Charles Darwin

Charles Darwin (1809–1882) was an English naturalist whose theory of evolution by natural selection changed the understanding of life. Born in Shrewsbury and educated at Edinburgh and Cambridge, he sailed as naturalist on HMS Beagle from 1831 to 1836, and the observations he made in South America and the Galápagos led him, over twenty years of private work at Down House in Kent, to On the Origin of Species (1859). The Descent of Man (1871) and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) extended the argument to human beings; he also wrote on orchids, barnacles, earthworms and coral reefs. He was buried in Westminster Abbey.