The naturalist who proposed natural selection as the mechanism of evolution, producing a theory so coherent and so well-evidenced that it made divine creation scientifically unnecessary within biology, and permanently transformed how humans understand the relationship between life and time, and established biology as a historical science
Darwin spent twenty years not publishing. He gathered evidence from 1838 — when he first formulated natural selection — until 1859, when Alfred Russel Wallace's independent arrival at the same idea forced his hand. The twenty-year delay was not indolence. It was the calculation of a man who understood exactly how dangerous his argument was and wanted it to be unimpeachable before he released it. He was right about the danger and right about the strategy.