The Origin of Species Author: Darwin Publisher: Zhonghua Book Company

Charles Robert Darwin (1809-1882) was a British naturalist and the founder of the theory of evolution. He was born on February 12, 1809 in a British doctor's family. He studied medicine at the University of Edin from 1825 to 1828, and later entered Cambridge University to study theology. After graduating from Cambridge University in 1831, he traveled around the world as a naturalist on the naval exploration ship "Beagle" for five years (1831-1836), observing and collecting a large amount of materials on animals, plants and geology. After summarizing and comprehensively analyzing, he formed the concept of biological evolution. In 1859, he published the book "On the Origin of Species", which comprehensively proposed the theory of evolution based on natural selection. The publication of this book shocked the academic community at that time and became a turning point in the history of biology. The theory of evolution by natural selection fundamentally challenges various idealistic creationism, teleology and species immutability. This fundamentally changed the concepts and ideas that had been formed in various fields of biology at that time. Darwin subsequently published books such as The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication (1868), The Descent of Man (1871), and The Expression of the Emotions in Animals and Man (1872), which systematically described artificial selection and proposed theories of sexual selection and the origin of humans, further enriching the content of the theory of evolution.