Charles Darwin

204 years ago today, Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin shared their birthday. Darwin is best known as the co-originator of the theory of evolution by natural selection with Alfred Russel Wallace, but he had a long career full of accomplishments as a naturalist. You can read more about that, and Mr. Darwin in general, here:
Charles Darwin

What I find most interesting about Darwin's story is the way he seemed to ascend to the top of everything he sought to do. He made an astonishing variety of observations on his way around the world with the HMS Beagle in his early 20s, covering the gamut of biology, geology, and natural history. His descriptions of the natural world lent much support to the ideas that were just starting to gain traction in the early 1800s that described an Earth much more ancient than anyone had previously imagined. Darwin was the first biologist to form a coherent explanation for how coral reefs form, and the first to attack the problem of how earthworms move. His career showed brilliant turns as a theorist, experimenter, and observer, a combination of elements that seems to happen only a few times a century in science. /Whatever the future path of human events may be, Darwin's life is sure to be an inspiration to up-and-coming scientists of all stripes for centuries to come.