When British naturalist Charles Darwin sketched out his theory of evolution in the 1859 book "On the Origin of Species" - proposing that biological species change over time through the acquisition of traits that favor survival and reproduction - it provoked a revolution in scientific thought.
When folks conflate a scientific law with a scientific theory. Theories are scientific explanations about why things happen. Laws are descriptions, that don’t provide explanation.
That’s not a distinction generally used by scientists.
Newton’s laws of motion and Einstein’s theory of special relativity are both sets of equations that describe motion, but they do not explain why gravity obeys an inverse square law, why c is invariant, etc.
In contrast, Gause’s law of competitive exclusion and Darwin’s theory of natural selection both explain population distributions in nature.