Almost 150 years after the pub­lish­ing of The Ori­gin of Species, the the­ory of evo­lu­tion by nat­ural selec­tion has come a long way. We now have sup­port­ing evi­dence not only from the vast fos­sil record, but from the genetic code writ­ten in the DNA of all Earthly life. The evo­lu­tion­ary process has been har­nessed by phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal com­pa­nies and soft­ware devel­op­ers to make bet­ter med­i­cine and solve com­plex prob­lems. Evo­lu­tion has given us a new under­stand­ing of our place in the universe.

Many of the the­o­ries of sci­ence — rel­a­tiv­ity, quan­tum mechan­ics, evo­lu­tion — must , in some sense, be true because they make pre­cise pre­dic­tions that are ver­i­fied by exper­i­men­tal evi­dence. It has been said that quan­tum mechan­ics (physics on the atomic scale) makes pre­dic­tions so pre­cise that it is equiv­a­lent to mea­sur­ing the width of the United States to one width of hair. The dis­cov­ery of DNA and the rapid sequenc­ing of genomes have both fur­ther sup­ported pre­dic­tions made by evo­lu­tion. Dar­win knew that evo­lu­tion could only work if traits were passed on from par­ents to off­spring, but he didn’t know what the mech­a­nism was for pass­ing those traits on. The answer was DNA, but the link between hered­ity and DNA wouldn’t be dis­cov­ered until 1952. 50 years after that the genet­ics rev­o­lu­tion began, and for the first time we were able to see the fine detail of our genes. We can now com­pare directly the sequence of code that makes us with that of other ani­mals. The proof is in the code: all life is related .

While we con­tinue to learn more about evo­lu­tion from biol­ogy, at the same time we are apply­ing that knowl­edge to some of our most dif­fi­cult prob­lems. Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal com­pa­nies now use the prin­ci­ples of nat­ural selec­tion to pro­duce bet­ter med­i­cine. Soft­ware devel­op­ers, sci­en­tists, and even artists are apply­ing genetic algo­rithms to breed bet­ter and bet­ter solu­tions to prob­lems. For a sci­en­tist a genetic algo­rithm might look for the best solu­tion to cli­mate change or the most effi­cient design for a solar cell. A genetic algo­rithm might be used by an artist to find the most pleas­ing aes­thetic, or the best read­abil­ity. If 10% of the power of bio­log­i­cal evo­lu­tion can be har­nessed by this kind of arti­fi­cial evo­lu­tion then the big break­throughs are prob­a­bly yet to come.

Darwin’s idea shat­ters our anthro­pocen­tric ten­den­cies by show­ing us our true place in the uni­verse: we are one of mil­lions of ani­mals, all of which share a com­mon ances­tor. We should be hum­bled by our small­ness, but also be opti­mistic about all of the pos­si­bil­i­ties for our species. We are the only intel­li­gent, self-aware species that we know of in 100 bil­lion galax­ies! And some­day, if we sur­vive, we will have all of the galax­ies to explore.

Tomor­row is the 200th anniver­sary of Darwin’s birth­day. In honor of this great thinker and doer, I would like to sug­gest that you take 15 min­utes to read about Darwin’s the­ory of evo­lu­tion by nat­ural selec­tion. Con­sider what it means about life and why we are here. The wikipedia entry is a good start. You might also enjoy this lec­ture series by Prof. Richard Dawkins titled Grow­ing Up in the Uni­verse were he explains evo­lu­tion in detail with lots of real world exam­ples and visu­als. It’s enter­tain­ing at the least.