Evolution of Evolution — Text-only | Flash Special Report
Charles Darwin

“I will here give a brief sketch of the progress of opinion on the Origin of Species.  Until recently the great majority of naturalists believed that species were immutable productions…  Some few naturalists, on the other hand, have believed that species undergo modification….”
– On The Origin of Species

As a young man and against the initial objections of his father, Charles Robert Darwin finished his studies at the University of Cambridge in England and set off on a five-year trip around the world studying nature onboard the Royal Navy ship, the HMS Beagle. His studying of plants and animals and collecting fossils soon led him to an idea so subversive that he would hide it from view for more than two decades. When he published it on Nov. 24, 1859, his idea that ‘natural selection’ is the process that drives evolution shocked many of his peers. But the book based on that idea–“On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life”—became arguably the most significant scientific work in the last two centuries.