“A century and a half ago, Charles Darwin offered the world a single, simple scientific explanation for the diversity of life on Earth: evolution by natural selection.”
“Natural selection.” Eldredge explains, “is a simple mechanism that causes populations of living things to change over time.”
Faced with the failure of the Stanley-Urey model to explain the origin of life, evolutionary scientists have been exploring the RNA World theory. With only the four nucleic acids required to form RNA (pictured left) rather than the twenty amino acids to form a protein, the chance probability tipped the advantage to the RNA-first theory, but that is not all.
“This is the RNA World. To see how plausible it is, we need to look at why proteins are good at being enzymes but bad at being replicators; at why DNA is good at replicating but bad at being an enzyme; and finally why RNA might just be good enough at both roles to break out of the Catch-22.”
In the mid twentieth century, using a simple laboratory experiment, Stanley Miller (pictured left) and Harold Urey (pictured right) was the first to demonstrate how life may have started from simple molecules and energy. In the excitement, addressing the scope of the Miller-Urey probability issue was postponed.
This is the story of the Ida fossil fiasco. “This little creature is going to show us our connection with the rest of all the mammals, with cows and sheep, and elephants and anteaters,” said Sir David Attenborough, who narrated the BBC documentary in May 2009. “The more you look at Ida, the more you can see, as it were, the primate in embryo.” Really?
“It tells a part of our evolution that’s been hidden so far. It’s been hidden because the only [other] specimens are so incomplete and so broken there’s nothing almost to study”,
In a letter to Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker, his closest friend in 1857, Charles Darwin confided, “I cannot swallow Man [being that] distinct from a Chimpanzee.” Chimp genetics, by extension of Darwin’s theory, were expected to be similar to humans. Charles Darwin writes in his Autobiography –
“MyDescent of Manwas published in Feb. 1871. As soon as I had become, in the year 1837 or 1838, convinced that species were mutable products, I could not avoid the belief that man must come under the same law.”
In The Descent of Man, Darwin argued against the concept that the Neanderthals were humans’ ancestors based on the Neanderthal skull’s larger size. “Nevertheless,” Darwin noted,
“it must be admitted that some skulls of very high antiquity, such as the famous one of Neanderthal, are well developed and capacious.”
Each fossil record discovery has a unique story, and the Archaeoraptor matter is undoubtedly no exception. In November 1999, a feature article in National Geographictitled “Feathers for T. Rex? New Birdlike Fossils Are Missing Links In Dinosaur Evolution” played out to be one of the most spectacular debacles in the history of paleontology rivaling the Piltdown Man saga. The article alleged –
“A true missing link in the complex chain that connects dinosaurs to birds.”
Discovered in the northeastern Liaoning Province of China in 1997 by farmers (pictured left), the fossil appeared to have a bird’s body with a small, terrestrial dinosaur’s teeth and tail. The name given to the fossil, Archaeoraptor liaoningensis, is in recognition of its discovery site.
Darwin had a significant influence on Karl Marx (pictured left). Struggle and survival are central to Darwin’s theory of evolution. The full 1859 title of The Origin is – On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection and the Survival of the Fittest in the Preservation of Favoured Races.
Darwin’s premise on survival and struggle in nature paralleled Karl Marx’s premise on social class struggle. Marx summarized the importance of “struggle” in the first line of chapter one of The Communist Manifesto, published in 1848 –
“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”
His father reasoned that a Bachelor of Arts degree in theology would qualify Darwin to become financially independent as a Church of England clergyman—a guaranteed government professional with a comfortable income.
The consensus on the scientific validity of Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection varies even between evolution scientists.
Richard Dawkins, perhaps the most famous advocate of evolution in the twenty-first century, explained that natural selection represents a “non-random survival of randomly varying hereditary instructions” in the article “The Illusion of Design,” published in the Natural History Magazine.
While Dawkin’s explanation of natural selection is widely popular, a consensus amongst evolution scientists remains a contentious issue.
Darwin, Then and Now, the Most Amazing Story in the History of Science, chronicles Darwin's life, how he developed his hypothesis, specifically what he said, and what scientists have discovered since the publication of The Origin of Species in 1859.
The book traces the rise and fall of evolution's popularity as a scientifically valid theory. With over 1,000 references from Darwin and scientists, Darwin Then and Now retraces developments in the most amazing story in the history of science.
Darwin Then and Now is an educational resource focusing on understanding the intersection of evolution and science to develop basic skills for analyzing and assessing the theory of biological evolution.
Natural selection is a simple scientific theory, according to the American Museum of Natural History, New York. For the museum’s Darwin Exhibit, the museum curator, Niles Eldredge, explains:
Faced with the failure of the 
This is the story of the Ida fossil fiasco. “This little creature is going to show us our connection with the rest of all the mammals, with cows and sheep, and elephants and anteaters,” 
In 1856, just three years before the publication of 
Each 
Darwin had a significant influence on 
The consensus on the scientific validity of Charles Darwin’s theory of 