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Huxley and his fellow members of the X Club to secularise science by promoting scientific naturalism. The debate over the book contributed to the campaign by T. H. Darwin was already highly regarded as a scientist, so his findings were taken seriously and the evidence he presented generated scientific, philosophical, and religious discussion. The book was written for non-specialist readers and attracted widespread interest upon its publication. The political and theological implications were intensely debated, but transmutation was not accepted by the scientific mainstream. Ideas about the transmutation of species were controversial as they conflicted with the beliefs that species were unchanging parts of a designed hierarchy and that humans were unique, unrelated to other animals. There was growing support for such ideas among dissident anatomists and the general public, but during the first half of the 19th century the English scientific establishment was closely tied to the Church of England, while science was part of natural theology. Various evolutionary ideas had already been proposed to explain new findings in biology. Darwin included evidence that he had collected on the Beagle expedition in the 1830s and his subsequent findings from research, correspondence, and experimentation. The book presented a body of evidence that the diversity of life arose by common descent through a branching pattern of evolution.

Darwin's book introduced the scientific theory that populations evolve over the course of generations through a process of natural selection. On the Origin of Species (or, more completely, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life) is a work of scientific literature by Charles Darwin that is considered to be the foundation of evolutionary biology it was published on 24 November 1859.