Many people think that Charles Darwin came up with the idea of evolution. He didn't. In fact, by the time he hit the world stage, many people already believed in evolution and there were already a number of theories, such as those of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, that sought to explain it. Darwin was merely the first to come up with a workable hypothesis.
Today, Darwin's theory pops up in places you wouldn't expect. Besides medicine, where it has great influence, algorithms based on Darwin's work are used in everything from logistics to engineering. As Pedro Domingos explains in The Master Algorithm, it has also made major contributions to artificial intelligence.
