Celebrating Evolution

On this day, 197 years ago, the Isaac Newton of Biology was born – and his name was.. Charles Darwin – that young explorer of the ship HMS Beagle, the author of “The Origin of Species”.

Darwin’s theory of Evolution stands at the core of all life. In the words of Dobzhansky “Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution”

So, on this day I wish Happy Darwin day !
To all the beings that live on earth – from the tiny little viruses to the gigatic whales ,
To the birds and the fishes, to the plants that flower and those that don’t,
To the algae and the fungi, to all our bacterial brothers,
To the worms and the leeches, to the dogs and the cats,
To the rats and other rodents, the snakes and the lizards,
To the ants and the spiders, the snails and the turtles
To the crabs and the sponges….
And last but not the least-
To my fellow humans who among the innumerable species that populate the earth
Figured out for the first time the unity that underies all life -
One universal language of nucleic acids,
One tree of life ,
One common lineage of ancestry,
One phenomenon that causes life-
Evolution !

As Darwin said at the end of his book

” 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.”