Charles Darwin was a British scientist who laid the foundations of the modern theory of evolution with his concept of the development of all life forms through the slow process of natural selection. His work has had a major influence on the life and earth sciences and on modern thought in general. Darwin was born in 1809 in Shrewsbury, a small market town in Shropshire, England. His wealthy doctor father was the son of Erasmus Darwin who wrote the Laws of Organic Life. His mother was the daughter of the artisan Josiah Wedgwood, famous for tableware. Although she died when he was eight, Darwin enjoyed a happy and secure childhood, loved and encouraged by four adoring sisters, an older brother named Erasmus, a team of loyal servants, and many of Darwin and Wedgwood's relatives. Even when he was young, Charles collected specimens from nature and conducted chemical experiments. When he reached the age of 16, his father sent him to the University of Edinburgh to study medicine, a concept for which he had no enthusiasm. Therefore, his father sent him to Cambridge University to study theology. There, Darwin met botanist John Stevens Henslow, whose passion for science rubbed off on Darwin. This prompted him to work more intensively on his study of specimens. Abandoning the idea of ​​studying for a career in the Church, he left Cambridge at 22 and immediately joined a scientific group which was on a walking tour of north Wales to learn how to carry out geological work on the ground. Shortly after the tour ended, Darwin received a life-changing offer. In 1831, the British Admiralty invited him to sail as an unpaid naturalist aboard the HMS Beagle, which was heading to South America and the Pacific Islands on a scientific expedition. Darwin's work, an idea in the middle of a paper, placed Europeans at the head of a hierarchy of racial types. Like most of his contemporaries, Darwin was convinced that Europeans conquered the world not only because they had superior technology, but also because they were more brilliant than other races. He commented at length on the various factors that seemed to drive the inferior races into a decline toward extinction when confronted by white settlers. Despite healthy habits, Darwin was ill for much of his adult life, plagued by insomnia and stomach aches. His supporters tended to glorify his condition as the price to pay for such stressful intellectual activity, while the Church blamed his problems on a guilty conscience and denounced him from pulpits across England for his beliefs. Darwin died at his home in Kent in 1882 and was buried reverently alongside English heroes at Westminster Abbey..