Charles Darwin did not come up with the idea of evolution, he was merely the first to come up with an explanation for how evolution worked that explained what he and other biologists saw in the world. Darwin came up with the idea of Natural Selection. This is the idea that the environment an organism lives in helps to determine which organisms survive and produce young, and which do not.
This site provides information and excerpts about the history of cognition, beginning with Charles Darwin, extending to his protégé, George Romanes, as well as Pavlov, Lorenz and Skinner. This site is most interested in what modern philosophers term the 'continuity of consciousness' across species and there is a bias in favor of this subdiscipline. Links from this page to intelligence, perception, stimulus control and language and tool use make this a useful site for those interested in evolutionary biology and natural history.