Western Culture Global Presents The Top 100 Heroes of Western Culture These individuals have most contributed to replacing ignorance with knowledge, savagery with civilization, disease with health, tyranny with liberty, poverty with abundance, and despair with happiness. #77: Charles Darwin (1809-1882) Charles Darwin (1809-1882) was an English naturalist who demonstrated that all species of life have evolved over time from common ancestors through a process he termed natural selection. Darwin was the first evolutionary biologist. Although the idea of species originating through evolution has been around since Aristotle and Lucretius, it was Darwin who gathered indisputable evidence for it and identified the process by which evolution works. Darwin's ideas and writings, combined with those of Gregor Mendel form the "modern synthesis,” the foundation of all modern biology. Perhaps more importantly, Darwin’s ideas show that life, including human life, is not a product of supernatural intervention. Rather, life belongs fully in the domain of the natural world -- the world of order, lawfulness and, consequently, human understanding. In other words, Darwin's work, like that of so many other Western culture heroes, demonstrates how the human mind has the power to unlock the deepest and widest truths of nature. Go to #78: Nikolaus Otto Top 100 Western Culture Heroes — Home Top 100 Western Culture Heroes — by Numerical Order Top 100 Western Culture Heroes — by Century Top 100 Western Culture Heroes — by Category
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