On the Origin of Species

That's not exactly how he's portrayed today.

But when he originally wrote his Origins of Species and books on evolution, this might surprise us today, but it was actually the theologians and clergy who actually said, yes, this is a very viable theory.

because the way they saw evolution is that evolution is probably a tool God uses for the continuation of the earth, human life, those kinds of things.

So early, when his Origins of Species came out, it was very much accepted for the most part in the religious, theological, and clergy world.

It was actually the secular community that had a very difficult time with Darwin's theory of evolution, mainly dealing with this notion of selective breeding, because they would argue that if evolution takes so much time, then how can I take features of one animal and features of another animal, breed them together, and get those features out of them that I want? Evolution shouldn't take, you know, centuries and centuries to evolve a singular behavior because I can crossbreed and selectively breed here and now.

and change the behaviors of animals now.

But it must now operate in a world that we understand to be defined by mutation, variation, and constant change.

Even the author of On the Origin of Species once wrote to a friend how maddening it was trying to draw hand boundaries around organisms.

I have gnashed my teeth, cursed species, and asked what sin I had committed to be so punished, Darwin wrote.

One common definition says that two organisms are different species if they can't interbreed, which makes good sense until you think about, say, the climate change-induced merging of polar bear territory with grizzly territory, resulting in pisley bears.

But it must now operate in a world that we understand to be defined by mutation, variation, and constant change.

Even the author of On the Origin of Species once wrote to a friend how maddening it was trying to draw hand boundaries around organisms.

I have gnashed my teeth, cursed species, and asked what sin I had committed to be so punished, Darwin wrote.

One common definition says that two organisms are different species if they can't interbreed, which makes good sense until you think about, say, the climate change-induced merging of polar bear territory with grizzly territory, resulting in pisley bears.

But it must now operate in a world that we understand to be defined by mutation, variation, and constant change.

Even the author of On the Origin of Species once wrote to a friend how maddening it was trying to draw hand boundaries around organisms.

I have gnashed my teeth, cursed species, and asked what sin I had committed to be so punished, Darwin wrote.

One common definition says that two organisms are different species if they can't interbreed, which makes good sense until you think about, say, the climate change-induced merging of polar bear territory with grizzly territory, resulting in pisley bears.

But it must now operate in a world that we understand to be defined by mutation, variation, and constant change.

Even the author of On the Origin of Species once wrote to a friend how maddening it was trying to draw hand boundaries around organisms.

I have gnashed my teeth, cursed species, and asked what sin I had committed to be so punished, Darwin wrote.

One common definition says that two organisms are different species if they can't interbreed, which makes good sense until you think about, say, the climate change-induced merging of polar bear territory with grizzly territory, resulting in pisley bears.

That's what he called it.

And then when he learned that Alfred Russell Wallace had also come up with this idea of natural selection, he scrapped the Big Book in order to quickly get out Origin of Species.

Um, but origin of species was intended as an abstract.

Yeah.

I mean, it's, it's, it's a long abstract.

This is one of the things that we've really learned about how evolution works since Darwin's lifetime.

Charles Darwin used the word slow 144 times in The Origin of Species.

He was really emphasizing, this is a slow, gradual process.

And for a long time, that's what we assumed.

But it must now operate in a world that we understand to be defined by mutation, variation, and constant change.

Even the author of On the Origin of Species once wrote to a friend how maddening it was trying to draw hand boundaries around organisms.

I have gnashed my teeth, cursed species, and asked what sin I had committed to be so punished, Darwin wrote.

One common definition says that two organisms are different species if they can't interbreed, which makes good sense until you think about, say, the climate change-induced merging of polar bear territory with grizzly territory, resulting in pisley bears, or the fact that the bears share ancestry.