In On the Origin of Species (1859), the British naturalist Charles Darwin argued that species change over time through natural selection, in which heritable variations that aid survival and reproduction accumulate across generations. Drawing on observations from his Beagle voyage and decades of work on domestic breeding and barnacles, he explained the diversity and adaptation of life as descent with modification from common ancestors. The book offered a material mechanism for biological change without recourse to design, and provoked immediate scientific and theological controversy.
It transformed biology and recast humanity as part of, rather than apart from, the natural world. Its vocabulary of organism, adaptation and growth was later borrowed by writers such as Patrick Geddes for organic and evolutionary theories of how cities develop and change.
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