by Richard William Nelson | Feb 19, 2025
Charles Darwin envisioned life on Earth as developing naturally over long periods of time. In The Origin of Species, Darwin varyingly rephrased this principle of natural selection, for example –
“I do believe that natural selection will generally act very slowly, only at long intervals of time.”
Time is the fourth of natural selection’s five principles developed by Niles Eldredge (pictured right below) of the American Museum of Natural History. V.I.S.T.A. is the acronym developed by Niles to encapsulate Darwin’s five principles of natural selection.
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by Richard William Nelson | Sep 7, 2024
Selection is the third of the five principles of natural selection, abbreviated as V.I.S.T.A. Selection acts to bring things together, as recently observed in the water flea (pictured left).
Selection is the core function of natural selection.
Niles Eldredge (pictured right below), paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History, formulated the V.I.S.T.A. acronym to outline Charles Darwin’s five principles. While selection is Darwin’s most core principle, it is also the most controversial of the five.
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by Richard William Nelson | Jul 13, 2023
Evolution centers on offering a natural explanation to account for Earth’s vast and diverse biosphere.
A core measure of evolution is the concept of species, the prime number of evolution. The importance of the concept is highlighted in the title of Charles Darwin’s bestseller —
“On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection”
One of modern biology’s principal functions includes the naming, grouping, and defining of species. However, exploring the history of the term opens a fascinating window into the checkered history of Darwin’s theory of natural selection.
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by Richard William Nelson | Jan 3, 2023
Mendel rescued Darwin’s theory of natural selection early in the twentieth century – to a point.
By the end of the nineteenth century, Charles Darwin’s influence had continued to deteriorate, stemming from his obsolete theory of inheritance.
In the search for a scientifically valid theory, scientists, early in the twentieth century, rediscovered Gregor Mendel’s genetic inheritance theory, which had been published thirty years earlier.
Mendel’s theory delivered what Darwin missed – a scientifically valid theory of inheritance capable of driving evolution.
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by Richard William Nelson | Nov 8, 2022
Inheritance is the second of the five principles of natural selection, abbreviated as V.I.S.T.A. Niles Eldredge, a paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History, formulated the acronym to understand Darwin’s theory of evolution.
For the museum’s Darwin exhibit, Eldridge uses the acronym to explain how the principles of variation, inheritance, selection, time, and adaptation drive natural selection. Inheritance is the second principle of Charles Darwin’s concept of natural selection.
In 1837, nearly twenty years before publishing The Origin of Species, Darwin drew his first sketch linking species by inheritance (pictured left).
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Mendel rescued Darwin’s theory of 
