Chapter 3: Darwin's Vision

1. Charles Darwin began his voyage believing, like everyone else, that species were individually designed and placed in their habitats by the Creator.

2. Darwin was troubled by the question that if the earth changes constantly and keeps destroying habitats and their species, how are replacement species introduced?

3. Darwin would have to find an explanation far more plausible than Lamarck's willful transmutation or Cuvier's global catastrophes.

4. By applying Malthus' "iron law" of human economics to the world of nature, Darwin discovered the answer: natural selection.

5. Natural selection is the sorting device that acts upon variation, giving historical direction to evolutionary trends. Over vast stretches of time, the accumulation of traits gradually transforms one species into its descendent species.

6. If true, his theory would obliterate the universally held view that God had crafted each species for its special role in nature. Darwin was well aware of the profound moral issues his theory would raise.

7. Darwin published in 1859 his theory of evolution in The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. By marshaling a massive amount of factual detail behind tightly woven arguments, his treatise eventually managed to win over his opponents.

8. By the time Darwin died in 1882, his theory of evolution had become the central organizing principle of all biological thought, as it remains to this day.

9. Between them, Newton and Darwin had constructed two fundamental and fundamentally different systems of scientific thought. Newton's universe was stationary, perfectly knowable and perfectly predictable. In Darwin's world, history mattered. The shape of the future depended on the outcome of past events.

10. Because it has taken 130 years since the publication of The Origin to pin down enough hard evidence to turn evolutionary theory into natural law; because religious fundamentalists still vigorously oppose its teaching, the impression that evolution is "still just a theory" will abide for decades to come. Nonetheless, Darwin's evolution is as real as Newton's gravity.