The Path of Evolution

Abstract

In 1859, the English naturalist Charles Darwin explained in his book, entitled “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection”, how biological development transformed the earliest lifeforms on Earth into the rich panoply of life seen today. He summarized his findings in the following sentence:

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.