Word: darwin
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...only fitting to recognize the accomplishments of a great biologist. But there's a risk to all this Darwinmania: some people may come away with a fundamental misunderstanding about the science of evolution. Once Darwin mailed his manuscript of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life to his publisher, the science of evolution did not grind to a halt. That would be a bit like saying medicine peaked when Louis Pasteur demonstrated that germs cause diseases. (See a photo-essay on Darwin...
Today biologists are exploring evolution at a level of detail far beyond what Darwin could, and they're discovering that evolution sometimes works in ways the celebrated naturalist never imagined. "The biological problems we're dealing with are much more complex," says Massimo Pigliucci, an evolutionary biologist at Stony Brook University in New York. "That said, it's a lot of fun. I'm not complaining...
...Darwin developed his theory by gathering as much information as he could about life. He collected it while voyaging on the Beagle, by sitting in front of a microscope back in England and by writing to a global network of correspondents. Today, however, biologists can feast on a far bigger banquet of data. The fossil record was scanty in Darwin's day, but now it has pushed the evidence of life on Earth back to at least 3.4 billion years ago. And while Darwin recognized that variation and heredity were the twin engines that made evolution possible, he didn...
Time and again, biologists are finding that Darwin had it right: evolution is the best way to explain the patterns of nature. "You just can't even start to make sense of all this data without a framework of evolution," says Günter Wagner, an evolutionary biologist at Yale University...
...Darwin proposed that natural selection could gradually transform a species. Scientists have observed thousands of cases of natural selection in action. They've documented that beaks of finches on the Galápagos Islands have gotten thicker when droughts forced the birds to crack tough seeds to survive. They've observed bacteria develop resistance to drugs that were believed to be invincible. Now biologists are applying DNA-sequencing technology to natural selection, which lets them identify the individual genetic changes that boost reproductive success...