What Darwin Never Knew

Darwin's idea of evolution through natural and sexual selection has been dubbed by many as perhaps the greatest single idea anyone has ever come up with. In a remarkable stroke of genius, Chuck was able to bridge the gap between the world of inanimate matter with the world of life; he was able to explain the diversity of life on earth, including great transformations, and the mechanism responsible for that diversity; and he provided a single, coherent, testable theory capable of unifying all of the different and previously disparate biological sciences into a single, beautiful and elegant framework whose individual parts provide independent confirmation for the rest.

Relying on the elegance of his theory, Darwin postulated various predictions based on the logical consequences of his theory, but often without any direct evidence. More than a hundred and fifty years after the publication of his magnus opus, most of those predictions are being borne out by empirical experiment and scientific innovations that Darwin could never have dreamed of.

More impressively still, new scientific disciplines (like evo devo and epigenetics, for instance) are finally revealing the mechanisms capable of explaining these incredible phenomena in ways that provide even more astonishing support for Darwin's theory of evolution through natural selection.

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