O n this 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his monumental The Origin of Species (1859) (1), it seems fitting to summarize Darwin’s views on human evolution and to show how far we have come since. Darwin famously neglected the subject in The Origin, except near the end where he noted only that ‘‘light would be thrown on the origin of man ...

In 1859, Charles Darwin published The Origin o/Species, a seminal work that defined the beginning of evolutionary biology (Darwin. 1859). However, Darwin's studies were con­ strained by phenotype-those characteristics of organisms that could be visibly observed, both in living and in the fossil record. The discovery of DNA as the method by which genetic information was transferred (Avery et al....

Population viability is determined by the interplay of environmental influences and individual phenotypic traits that shape life histories and behavior. Only a few years ago the common wisdom in evolutionary ecology was that adaptive evolution would optimize a population’s phenotypic state in the sense of maximizing some suitably chosen measure of fitness, such as its intrinsic growth rate r or...

For centuries, the greatest puzzle in biology was how to account for the sheer variety of life. in his 1859 landmark book, On the Origin of Species, charles Darwin (1809–1882) finally supplied an answer: his grand theory of evolution explained how the process of natural selection, acting on the substrate of genetic mutations, could gradually produce new organisms that are better adapted to thei...