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Celebrating Darwin

Thursday, February 12, 2009 marked the bicentenary of the birth of a great man, an inquisitor of rare quality who wrought a revolution in human thought — Charles Darwin. Although others before him, including his own grandfather, had toyed with ideas of evolution, it was Darwin who put together a formidable body of evidence in favour of one species changing gradually into another. More importantly, it was he who first grasped the mechanism driving such change. A process of natural selection, he argued, worked on variations in characteristics displayed by progeny in every generation. In the struggle to survive and reproduce, the fittest were favoured and succeeded in producing many more progeny, thereby spreading the characteristics that benefited them. Darwin explained all this in elegant, flowing prose. The first edition of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, which Darwin termed as being only an abstract, was published 150 years ago and ran to 502 pages. The book ends on a stirring note: “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.”

If Darwin could rise from the grave, he would doubtless be gratified that the magnificent advances made in science since his time have vindicated his theory of evolution. “The clearest evidence for the common ancestry of all living organisms comes from the universality of the Genetic Code,” writes Nobel Laureate James Watson, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA. With the ability to sequence genes and whole genomes has come new understanding about how evolution occurs at the most basic level. Individual ‘letters’ of the genetic code can get changed; bits of DNA can be deleted, added, or transposed; genes can get duplicated and take on new functions or, when they are no longer needed, wither away. Yet natural selection preserves important genes and their associated cellular processes across extraordinarily long periods of evolutionary change. Thus researchers these days study nerve development in fruit flies, aging in worms, and cancer in mice, knowing that their findings will be applicable to humans too. Darwin would, however, be deeply saddened that despite the overwhelming weight of scientific evidence that has accumulated in favour of evolution, opposition from those believing in a fundamentalist biblical view of creation has not abated. Evolution is no longer just a theory. “Evolution is a fact,” proclaims Dr. Watson, “disputed only by those who choose to ignore the evidence, put their common sense on hold and believe instead that unchanging knowledge and wisdom can be reached only by revelation.”

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