WITH HIS great work, On the Origin of Species, the nineteenth-century naturalist, Charles Darwin, changed the thinking of the world forever after.

Challenging the idea of "creation," he asserted that living forms follow a system of natural laws just as surely as do the tides and the sunsets. He assembled a great mass of evidence to prove that organic evolution really does take place; but even more important, he offered his theory, natural selection, as a reasonable means by which this process might come about. Today, scientists accept evolution as a basic fact of biology, and they recognize natural selection as the central agent in its working. Moreover, Charles Darwin is recognized as one of the all-time champions of free scientific thought.

Here is the story of the events that influenced Darwin to become a scientist; the incidents that shaped his thinking; the years of labor over his theory of natural selection; and the years of struggle for the acceptance of his theory.

From the book