Darwinism

Darwinism is the name given to the theory of biological evolution developed by the English naturalist Charles Darwin and his contemporaries in the nineteenth century, holding that species arise and change through the natural selection of small inherited variations that improve an individual's ability to compete, survive and reproduce. The term, coined by the biologist Thomas Henry Huxley in April 1860, originally covered the broader idea of the transmutation of species and drew on concepts that predated Darwin's own work. The theory gained wide scientific acceptance following the 1859 publication of On the Origin of Species, though Darwin's original account lacked a clear mechanism of inheritance, a gap that was later closed by neo-Darwinian ideas and, above all, by the modern synthesis that combined natural selection with Mendelian genetics.