Today we celebrate the 150th Anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin's magnum opus:
Darwin, C. R. 1859. On the origin of species by means of natural selection, or the preservation of fav...
Today we celebrate the 150th Anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin's magnum opus:
Darwin, C. R. 1859. On the origin of species by means of natural selection, or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life. London: John Murray. Published 24 November 1859
The Scientific Theory of Organic Evolution is possibly the most beautiful, and most misunderstood, fact of Science and the Natural World.
The Theory of Organic Evolution is a very well established scientific fact. And it's probably one of the crowning achievement of the human intellect!
"It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the external conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. 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."
To find out more about the facts and the scientific evidences that have confirmed Charles Darwin's original theory of Organic Evolution, you can watch here:
Richard Dawkins' talk at the 2009 Atheist Alliance International Conference in Burbank, California. He expands the last paragraph of Darwin's "On the Origin of Species" as a framework for the talk. This is also the framework for the last chapter of Dawkins' new book "The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution".
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