Celebrating the origin of species

Seema Singh — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 05:45:00 GMT

For a change, we are not bemoaning extinction of species.

This week marks the 150^th anniversary of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, and February will mark the 200^th birth anniversary of the man who opened an entirely new book on life, which was as much an exposition as a long, on-going debate. It's a debate that scientists are running in their labs as they try to decipher how and to what extent natural selection works, which is known to be working in groups rather than in individuals.

As unparalleled as the publication, and the man, was, there's an international consortium, Darwin200, celebrating Darwin's ideas and philosophy. It's virtually a feast!

In its special issue, Nature this week touches upon areas in which evolutionary biology offers insight, the basic premise being life mutates, is essentially ‘competitive' and distinctively shaped by the environment. What is fascinating about evolutionary biology is the fact that a process that started some 10 billions years ago, is still continuing.

This edit in Nature sums it all up: "Ideas on the transmutation of forms and the evolution of life have a long history; so, indeed, do Charles Darwin's personal views on the matter, which have provided historians with grist for many mills. But the way in which Darwin put together evidence and argument in On the Origin of Species marked a definitive break, and an undeniable beginning. The book, 149 years old this week, provided for the first time a way of reconciling life's past and present - a way to explain both the staggering diversity of life and its fundamental unity."

As we march ahead looking for new life forms outside solar system, tweak organisms, try our hand at new life forms using synthetic biology or even revive extinct life using modern tools of genetics (this week also marks the publication of a genome of an extinct woolly mammoth-Mammuthus primigenius), evolution gets a new meaning. How the laws of natural selection will play out in this century is a question that maybe Darwin 300 would answer!

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Lab Rats : charles darwin

Celebrating the origin of species