Escritos Íntimos

Charles Robert Darwin (12 February 1809 – 19 April 1882) was an English naturalist, geologist and biologist, famous for his advances in evolution in the biological sciences. Together with Alfred Wallace, Darwin established the idea that all living things descend from a common ancestor, an argument now widely accepted and considered a fundamental concept in the scientific community, and proposed the theory that evolutionary branches are the result of natural and sexual selection, where the struggle for survival results in consequences similar to those of artificial selection. His 1859 book, The Origin of Species, caused astonishment in the society and scientific community of the time, but achieved great acceptance in the following decades, overcoming the rejection that scientists had for the transmutation of species. As early as 1870, evolution by natural selection had the support of most intellectuals. Its near-universal acceptance, however, was not achieved until the emergence of the modern evolutionary synthesis in the 1930s and 1950s, when a broad consensus consolidated natural selection as the basic mechanism of evolution. Darwin's theory is considered the unifying mechanism for explaining life and diversity on Earth.