Charles Robert Darwin was a British naturalist, biologist, and geologist. He was born in Shrewsbury, England, on February 12, 1809, to an English scientific family. He died on April 19, 1882. His father was Dr. Robert Waring Darwin, and his grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, was also a scientist and author. Darwin gained fame as the founder of the theory of evolution, which states that all living organisms throughout time descend from common ancestors. He proposed a theory that included these branching patterns of evolution resulting from a process he described as natural selection, and that the struggle for survival has the same effect as artificial selection, contributing to the selective breeding of organisms.