Charles Robert Darwin (12 February 1809 – 19 April 1882) was an English naturalist who established that all species of life have descended over time from a common ancestry, and proposed the scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called natural selection.He published his theory with compelling evidence for evolution in his 1859 book On the Origin of Species, overcoming scientific rejection of earlier concepts of transmutation of species.
