On the origin of Darwinism

Charles Darwin was almost scooped. A quintessential thinker, after five years voyaging around the globe on the HMS Beagle and filling notebooks upon notebooks with his careful observations, he did not rush to widely disseminate the conclusions of his field study. Almost 20 years passed during which he further reflected on what he called “his theory” before he was urged to publish simultaneously with Alfred Russell Wallace, another naturalist and great thinker, who had independently formulated similar conclusions on variation within species and survival of the fittest (Darwin and Wallace 1858). These first extracts from Darwin's memoir were short and merely outlined what Darwin termed “natural selection,” but they established that he was the father of what we now know to be one of the greatest conceptual contributions to science and society.

Two-thousand-and-nine marks the 200th year since Charles Darwin's birth and the 150th anniversary of the initial publication of On the Origin of the Species, inspiring many celebrations of his life and reviews of the history of evolutionary biology, which stemmed from his cogitations (Darwin 1859). Genome Research is also commemorating the occasion, as it is precisely the time to take stock of the vast progress the fields of genetics and genomics have made in evolutionary biology since the seeds of Darwinism were sowed. Synthesis with the …