February 12, 2009 marks the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birthday(
Darwin Day), and November 24th 2009 marks the 150 year anniversary since the publication of
"The Origin of Species".
Throughout the year, Darwin and his idea will be celebrated at universities, in magazines, online journals, and television documentaries, and this thread will be the place to follow all of it!
Post cool links, ask questions, converse, or reflect on Darwin and his great idea in this thread.
Quote:
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Originally Posted by Darwin
"It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved."
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