ABSTRACT
Charles Darwin was and remains a towering figure of science for his ground-breaking theory of evolution in life forms that came to be known as Darwinism. Darwin is generally held to have been an unexceptional scholar as a child but became captivated by natural history as a young man. He initially studied medicine at Edinburgh, but his father, sensing his lack of commitment, switched him to Cambridge, where he studied the wider sciences and fully discovered his passion for nature. In 1831, he enrolled as a naturalist on the HMS Beagle surveying wildlife on the west coast of South America in a five-year voyage. On his return, Darwin worked on his thoughts for some twenty years before finally writing Origin of the Species in which he sets out his paradigm-shifting but also controversial theories. According to Darwin’s revolutionary theory, all species are connected and evolve through the process of ‘natural selection’.
