What if Darwin had known the new biology?
When Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species was published 150 years ago it was a response to the biggest problem posed at that time by natural history. His interpretation of a series of observations in nature supported the evolutionary origin of living beings, and this situated the evolutionary process in the perspective of “cause and effect”. Like all scientific theories, it implied a vision of the world and man — something we will come back to later. Natural selection is not everything in evolution To Darwin, random changes occurring in some individuals within a population (variation) allowed them to choose (natural selection) the most suitable environment in which to live longer and thus leave more descendants. The idea of natural selection in the evolutionary process is clever and accurate; scientists recognise that it has been directing adaptation over thousands of generations — we might say, improving the species. However, natural selection by itself is not a sufficient explanation
