Evolution is the central theory in modern biology. Evolution answers questions that creationism can't. Darwin didn't answer all of the questions, and he got some of the answers wrong.2 Biologists don't accept evolution because of some religious devotion to Darwin and his ideas. We accept evolution because it is the only scientific account of life and its origins that is consistent with the facts.
Had Darwin only established the common ancestry of all living things, his contributions would still have changed the world, and he would still be regarded as among the greatest scientists in history.
But the Origin and Darwin's 1858 paper with Alfred Russell Wallace in the journal of the Linnaen Society of London also set forth another immensely important theory: the theory of natural selection. It is both powerful and simple.
- More offspring are born than survive.
- Some traits of organisms make them more likely to survive than others.
- Many of those traits are passed from parents to offspring.
But for me, as important as the theory of natural selection is, the theory of common ancestry is even more fundamental -- even, perhaps, sublime. As Darwin himself put it in the final paragraph of the Origin 149 years ago today:
There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.
1Just so we're clear, the "races" in the title refer to races of plants and animals, i.e., varieties of plants and animals that differ from one another. Darwin was not referring to human races, despite the ignorant blather of a few creationists who seem to think that he was.,
2Darwin's theory of heredity, pangenesis, was been completely discredited by experimental work even before Mendel was rediscovered, and Ernst Mayr was fond of pointing out that Darwin didn't solve the problem of speciation. On the Origin of Species is a brilliant exposition of the theory of evolution by natural selection, but in spite of its title, it doesn't propose any theory of speciation.
3Assuming that there isn't countervailing selection on another stage of the life cycle.
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