Charles Robert Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, two nineteenth-century

British naturalists, were both profoundly impacted by the scientific revolution.

They changed people's minds about the origins of species because of their
diligent observations and development of a viable mechanism for evolutionary
change. Darwin and Wallace separately devised an explanation for why variety
emerges in living species and their interactions with the environment, as well
as the basic mechanism of evolution, after being impressed by the variation in
living species and their associated impacts. Natural selection is a mechanism
that causes genetic changes in a population as a result of differences in
reproductive success. Beginning in 1831, Darwin started on a five-year journey
around the world aboard the HMS Beagle, a British ship. He gathered various
plant and animal species from a range of locations during his travels. During a
trip to the Amazon in the 1840s and 1850s, Wallace examined several types of
plants and animals, and subsequently continued his studies in Southeast Asia
and on the islands off the coast of Malaysia. Darwin and Wallace separately
came up with the idea of natural selection, but Darwin went on to express it in
his book On the Origin of Species, published in 1859, in a detailed and well-
documented manner. Natural selection is based on variation within species
and reproductive success. Darwin and Wallace hypothesized that certain
individuals in a species are born with specific features or traits that help them
survive. For example, certain seeds in a plant species may naturally generate
more seeds than others, or some frogs in a same group may have coloration
that blends in better with the surroundings than others, reducing their chances
of being eaten by predators. Certain animals are more likely to reproduce and,
as a result, pass on these qualities to their offspring if they have these
favorable attributes. Natural selection is the name Darwin gave to this process
since it is nature, or the needs of the environment, that determines which
individuals survive. This process, which has occurred millions of times over
millions of years, is how organisms change or develop through time.