For a Victorian man to see the minute patterns of change over time is a pretty remarkable feat for someone living in an age when Darwin was fully aware of the religious backlash that such a discovery would generate. Not all of his theories have been proven accurate (which doesn't make him wrong), but he is solely responsible for his ground-breaking work on the evolution of plants, evolutionary biology, the formation of coral reefs and atolls and for changing Western thought and ideologies–particularly those entrenched in mythology, mysticism or just plain nonsense.