166 years ago today, the British naturalist and geologist Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species explaining his theory of evolution. The first edition—which has been voted by publishers and librarians as the most influential academic book ever written—introduced the scientific theory that populations evolve over the course of generations through a process of natural selection. It presented a body of evidence that the diversity of life arose by common descent through a tree-like branching pattern of evolution. WATCH an animation about how little finches were crucial to his discovery, and how pepper moths evolved due to pollution… (1859)

Darwin included evidence that he had gathered on expeditions to South America in the 1830s and his subsequent findings from research a

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