Charles Darwin (1809-1882) INTRODUCTION Charles Darwin has become an icon in our time, no less important than Columbus, Newton, Jefferson, Edison, Einstein, or Gates. He is seen as projecting out of the Victorian era like a colossus. The 1800’s are no less awe-inspiring than ours’ for its intellectual mindset and technological feats. Yet his morally severe and pompously conservative age was very different from our secular, deregulated world founded on naturalistic principles and fast information exchange. Darwin's theory of evolution was published in the On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection in 1859. As its implications sank in, late Victorians s