Coloured lithograph of Charles Darwin (1809-1882), the British naturalist and author of the Origin of Species. Darwin suggested that natural variation in a species creates a wide range of individual characteristics, some of which are more useful than others. The competition to survive in nature provides a driving force for evolution in the form of natural selection, a mechanism which weeds out those individuals possessing traits less suitable to the environment. The implications of his theory to man's own origins fuelled a bitter controversy with the christian orthodoxy.