On November 24, 1859, Charles Darwin’s book was published, On the Origin of Species.
How to celebrate? You could read a summary of Ernst Mayr’s shorthand version of Darwin’s theory, and understand it really for the first time (I hope not the first time, but there are a lot of people who really don’t understand what Darwin said — especially among critics of evolution):
- Every species is fertile enough that if all offspring survived to reproduce the population would grow (fact).
- Despite periodic fluctuations, populations remain roughly the same size (fact).
- Resources such as food are limited and are relatively stable over time (fact).
- A struggle for survival ensues (inference).
- Individuals in a population vary significantly from one another (fact).
- Much of this variation is inheritable (fact).
- Individuals less suited to the environment are less likely to survive and less likely to reproduce; individuals more suited to the environment are more likely to survive and more likely to reproduce and leave their inheritable traits to future generations, which produces the process of natural selection (inference).
- This slowly effected process results in populations changing to adapt to their environments, and ultimately, these variations accumulate over time to form new species (inference).