Top 10 Missing Links Discoveries that have helped build the puzzle of mankind's evolution. Vestigal Organs Darwin argued that useless limbs and leftover organs are evidence of evolution. The findings suggest that about 9 percent of the human genes examined are undergoing rapid evolution. "Our study suggests that natural selection has played an important role in patterning the human genome, " said Carlos Bustamante, a biologist at Cornell University. A separate study announced last month indicated the human brain is still evolving, too. Compared to chimps ... Bustamante's team found that the genes most affected were those involved in immunity, sperm and egg production and sensory perception. A comparison between human and chimpanzee genomes found that these genes have undergone more changes in humans than in chimps, despite the fact that the two species shared a common ancestor some 5 million years ago. The genes for a group of proteins important for switching other genes on and off, known as "transcription factors, " were found to vary significantly in humans and chimps. One reason for this could be that turning a gene on or off is easier than changing the gene itself. "We believe that if you want to evolve a system, it's usually easier to tweak when the protein gets turns on or the total amount of a protein as opposed to the amino acid itself, " Bustamante said. Negative selection The validity of Darwin's natural selection has been attacked lately by a small but vocal group who argue that it cannot explain all the complexity seen in nature. They advocate a concept called "intelligent design, " in which a higher being is responsible for the variety of life. Scientists dismiss intelligent design as cloaked creationism and say that there are no significant problems with the widely accepted theory of evolution. While mainstream scientists do not need further evidence that natural selection occurs, Bustamante's work provides examples of its pace and extent and offers the promise of medical advances down the road. Another 13 percent of the genes examined in the study showed evidence for negative selection, whereby harmful mutations are weeded out of the population. These included some genes implicated in hereditary diseases, such as muscular dystrophy and Usher syndrome. The latter is the most common cause of congenital blindness and deafness in developed countries. Medical geneticists are interested in finding genes sensitive to negative selection because they might one day be useful for predicting an individual's likelihood of developing a disease if the types of mutation to a gene and the environmental conditions are known. Being able to determine which classes of genes are particularly vulnerable to negative selections is a first step, Bustamante said.

Matthew Chapman, Darwin’s kin, will be the guest speaker July 28 at New York’s fledgling atheist church, The Sunday Assembly. Held in the Hell’s Kitchen bikini bar Tobacco Road, the Sunday Assembly is the brainchild of London-based stand-up comics Sanderson Jones and Pippa Evans, who are currently busy exporting their sunny brand of atheism to start-up congregations across the United States. Drawn in by the group’s motto sunny motto, “live better, help often and wonder more, ” New York’s first atheist service was attended by roughly 120 godless audience members, organizer Michael Dorian told the Daily News. Meredith Modzlewski Sunday Assembly founder Sanderson Jones helped launch the New York satellite congregation in June. .

EDITED BY EUGENE M. MCCARTHY, PHD CHARLES DARWIN'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY. Addendum. Written May 1st, 1881 [the year before his death]. Charles Darwin as an old man 'The Effects of Cross and Self-Fertilisation' was published in the autumn of 1876; and the results there arrived at explain, as I believe, the endless and wonderful contrivances for the transportal of pollen from one plant to another of the same species. I now believe, however, chiefly from the observations of Hermann Mller, that I ought to have insisted more strongly than I did on the many adaptations for self-fertilisation; though I was well aware of many such adaptations. A much enlarged edition of my 'Fertilisation of Orchids' was published in 1877. In this same year 'The Different Forms of Flowers, etc., ' appeared, and in 1880 a second edition. innean Society, corrected, with much new matter added, together with observations on some other cases in which the same plant bears two kinds of flowers. As before remarked, no little discovery of mine ever gave me so much pleasure as the making out the meaning of heterostyled flowers. The results of crossing such flowers in an illegitimate manner, I believe to be very important, as bearing on the sterility of hybrids; although these results have been noticed by only a few persons. In 1879, I had a translation of Dr. Ernst Krause's 'Life of Erasmus Darwin' published, and I added a sketch of his character and habits from material in my possession. Many persons have been much interested by this little life, and I am surprised that only 800 or 900 copies were sold. Francis "Frank" Darwin (1848-1924) In 1880 I published, with [my son] Frank's assistance, our 'Power of Movement in Plants.' This was a tough piece of work. ' which 'Cross-Fertilisation' did to the 'Fertilisation of Orchids;' for in accordance with the principle of evolution it was impossible to account for climbing plants having been developed in so many widely different groups unless all kinds of plants possess some slight power of movement of an analogous kind. This I proved to be the case; and I was further led to a rather wide generalisation, viz. that the great and important classes of movements, excited by light, the attraction of gravity, etc., are all modified forms of the fundamental movement of circumnutation. It has always pleased me to exalt plants in the scale of organised beings; and I therefore felt an especial pleasure in showing how many and what admirably well adapted movements the tip of a root possesses.

In the course of preparing for our new exhibition, ‘Edward Lear and the Scientists’, I came across an undated letter from Charles Darwin to an unidentified librarian. The letter, which has been transcribed online by the Darwin Correspondence Project, contained Darwin’s request to borrow a volume of the Philosophical Transactions , and ‘a great work descriptive of animals in Ld. Derby’s menagerie’. The latter is Gleanings from the Menagerie and Aviary at Knowsley Hall , a lavish privately-printed publication with illustrations by Edward Lear. I was about to put the Royal Society’s copy of this work, which had been donated to the library by Lord Derby himself, on display. Could Darwin have asked to borrow this very volume? Actually, as detective jobs go, this one was relatively straightforward, thanks to the record-keeping of past Royal Society librarians. In our archives we have a set of library lending registers from the 19th century, containing names of borrowers, dates, titles borrowed, and (most importantly from the librarian’s point of view) a column recording whether the volume had been returned. Opening any of the volumes immediately reveals what an important resource the Royal Society’s collection was for 19th century scientists, and how many of them took advantage of what were obviously rather more relaxed borrowing rules at the time (these days we don’t lend out Newton’s Principia!). Regular borrowers included Edward Sabine, John Lubbock, Charles Lyell, and Thomas Henry Huxley. One name that appears frequently is James Orchard Halliwell, who was later banned from the Reading Room of the British Museum on the suspicion he had stolen manuscripts from Trinity College Library (all his borrowings from the Royal Society seem to have been returned safely). Another name that appears very frequently is C. Darwin. Darwin was elected as a Fellow in January 1839, and his first entry in the lending register appears in April 1839, when he borrowed volume 4 of the Transactions of the Geological Society. He obviously found the Royal Society’s library collection a useful resource, because over the years to 1860 he borrowed books and sets of journal volumes on more than 120 occasions (and more after that date – I just haven’t counted them yet). The Society’s library gave him access to foreign journals, including the publications of the St Petersburg Academy (now the Russian Academy of Sciences), Berlin’s Knigliche Akademie der Wissenschaften (Royal Academy of Sciences), and the Brussels Acadmie Impriale et Royale des Sciences et Belles-Lettres. Darwin also borrowed travel books, some dating back to the 18th century. These included Constantine Phipps’s A Voyage towards the North Pole undertaken by His Majesty’s Command 1773 (London, 1774), which contained the first European description of the polar bear. Occasionally Darwin borrowed much older volumes, including Francis Willughby’s Ornithology, published in 1678, and the Italian Renaissance naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi’s works on birds (1599) and quadrupeds (1637).

By Sitala Peek BBC News, Birmingham Charles Darwin was so enamoured with the Thinking Path of his childhood, he created his own at Downe House in Kent where he wrote his theory of evolution Rising early each morning, the young Charles Darwin and his brother Erasmus were led by their father Robert on a walk of silent contemplation around the grounds of their home in Shropshire. The daily ritual lasted about half an hour and was designed to encourage the boys to reflect upon what they hoped to achieve with their day and how they would set about it. The Thinking Path made such a great impression on the future author of On the Origin of Species that Darwin created his own Sandwalk route when he set up home in Kent with his wife Emma. Charles Darwin's childhood garden in Shrewsbury is being opened to the public to celebrate his birthday. The property was set in 7.8 acres (3.1 hectares) overlooking the town and the River Severn, and indulged the family's passion for nature and gardening. One of Darwin's uncles on his mother's side went on to found the Horticultural Society of London, now the Royal Horticultural Society. After his father's death in 1848, The Mount was sold and the estate was divided, with one of the largest shares now owned by Sharon and John Leach. 'Otters rustling' The Leaches own about two acres of the original walled garden including the woodland, riverbank and part of the Thinking Path. Mrs Leach said: "My favourite spot is going down across the terrace, you go into the wood and there's such a feeling of calm. A letter Darwin wrote to his wife Emma in 1858 shows his deep love of gardens "The weather is quite delicious. Yesterday, after writing to you, I strolled a little beyond the glade for an hour and a half and enjoyed myself...the fresh yet dark green of the grand Scotch firs, the brown of the catkins of the old birches, with their white stems, and a fringe of distant green from the larches, made an excessively pretty view. At last I fell asleep on the grass, and awoke with a chorus of birds singing around me, and squirrels running up the trees, and some woodpeckers laughing, and it was as pleasant and rural a scene as I ever saw, and I did not care one penny how any of the beasts or birds had been formed." "It's so still apart from the otters you hear rustling about and the sparrow hawks. There's a fox that lives down there and the chatter of birds too. It's so tranquil. "There is a very large sweet chestnut tree at the rear end of the wood which seems to fit with a sketch we have seen of Charles and his sister Susan sitting in a sweet chestnut tree." Using old maps and photographs, the Leaches have re-laid part of the Thinking Path. "It's astounding to think of them taking their constitutional walk thinking about the consequences of their actions. "When Darwin returned from his voyages on HMS Beagle, he spent a long time thinking about the items he had collected and what they meant. By this time he had created the Sandwalk at Downe House where he later published his theories of evolution. "It's incredible to think that he was so profoundly influenced by the Thinking Path we have here." South American fossils Three years ago, Mrs Leach came across a "stinky, smelly, oily rag" in the garden near the ice house which she threw onto a bonfire. As she threw it, two fossils fell out of the cloth. Preliminary investigations have established the fossils are giant pine cones of a variety found in South America. The suspicion is they were among the collection Darwin brought back from his voyages in the Americas.

Printer-friendly version Image Source: "I am turned into a sort of machine for observing facts and grinding out conclusions." -Charles Darwin- A cartoon about Darwin's theory of "Evolution" Biographical Information: Charles Robert Darwin was born in February of 1809 in Shrewsbury, England and was the 5th of 6 children in his family. Darwin was born into a very wealthy family that had a lot of connections. His family members had all been very successful and Darwin lived a priviledged childhood. Charles’s father was alive for most of his adult life and worked as a local physician and a financer. Unfortunately, his mother died at a very young age, when she was only 52 years old. Darwin attended a nearby board school in Shrewsbury during his childhood, but after graduating that school, he decided to attend Edinburgh University in October 1985, along with his own brother to study medicine. Darwin was studying to become a physician, much like his successful father had done. While at Edinburgh, Darwin found himself studying marine invertebrates with Robert Grant, one of the most well known biologists of the early 19th century. Darwin soon realized he did not like the field of medicine after he couldn’t stand to see blood or suffering of humans for a regular basis and believed surgery was a form of human brutality, so he quickly left the medical field of study.

Women have interpreted and applied evolutionary theory in arguments about women’s nature for over a century. Eliza Burt Gamble (1841-1920) was a pioneer in this endeavor. Gamble was an advocate of the Woman Movement, a mother, a writer, and a teacher from Michigan. Over the course of her career, Gamble wrote three books: The Evolution of Woman (1894) , The God-Idea of the Ancients (1897), and The Sexes in Science and History (1916). In these works, Gamble sought to challenge male patriarchy using arguments grounded in religion, science, and history. Although Gamble’s work was the ‘road not taken, ’ Gamble was a trailblazer for her recognition of the significance of female choice in sexual selection, her use of evolutionary theory as a resource for arguments about women’s nature, and her criticism of androcentrism in science. win’s theory of sexual selection, Gamble even argued for the superiority of the female over the male. One portion of Darwin’s work that Gamble made particular use of in her argument for female superiority was the theory of sexual selection. Darwin defined sexual selection in his 1859 magnum opus On The Origin of Species. Darwin believed that sexual selection was critical to the development of secondary sexual characteristics, which he felt played an essential role in attracting mates but were not physically necessary for reproduction itself.[1] According to Darwin, secondary sexual characteristics resulted from male-male competition for mating privileges. As he explained, “it is the males that fight together and sedulously display their charms before the females; and those which are victorious transmit their superiority to their male offspring.”[2] As a result of this process, those males with sexual characteristics that females considered attractive would “leave a greater number of offspring to inherit their superiority than the beaten and less attractive males.”[3] While Gamble and Darwin both worked with the principles of evolution and sexual selection, they disagreed on the ultimate effect these processes had on the relative intelligences and abilities of the sexes. In The Descent of Man (1871) Darwin explicitly noted that “man has ultimately become superior to woman” and “attain[s] to a higher eminence, in whatever he takes up, than woman can attain.”[4] Gamble, on the other hand, suggested that through evolution and sexual selection the female sex had become more sophisticated and more intelligent than the male. Nonetheless, Gamble acknowledged a debt to Darwin. As she wrote in The Evolution of Woman:

Ecuador and the Galapagos Islands news: Charles Darwin station celebrates 50 years You can’t talk about the Galapagos Islands without mentioning Charles Darwin and how he was inspired to change the course of science, and indeed history, after his visit here 150 or so years ago. However, the legacy of Charles Darwin lives on in more than just the theory of evolution. Science is an ongoing process of discovery and it is thanks to research and continued dedication of scientists that we can unlock the secrets of the world, especially here in the mysterious Galapagos Islands. And this year celebrates another important milestone in that process. Fifty years ago in January 1964, a small ceremony was held in a clearing surrounded by cactuses, and the Charles Darwin Research Station (CDRS) was officially inaugurated on Santa Cruz Island Island. It was to be the operative arm of the Charles Darwin Foundation (CDF), an independent and non-governmental scientific organisation dedicated to research in the Galapagos. It was a big step for Ecuador and the Galapagos Islands, meaning full time research could be carried out into the exceptional flora and fauna of the islands. It also was a significant step towards preserving the islands for future generations. This was, you have to remember, a time when conservation and preservation were relatively new and many of the giant tortoises were being sold either as food or pets. Ecuador and the Galapagos definitely needed this development and it happened at just the right time. The station itself was an idea backed by the government of Ecuador as well as UNESCO, as had been the decision to turn the islands into a national park. The CDRS and CDF also supported and suggested the creation of the Galapagos Marine Reserve and its inclusion onto the World Heritage Site List. Since its inception in 1964, countless scientists have been brought together and the incredible flora and fauna has been preserved far better than would have otherwise been possible without the research station’s expert advice and action. All of this means that today, thankfully a Galapagos custom vacation means you have the opportunity to see these incredible islands, marvel at the wildlife and travel safe in the knowledge that you are doing as little damage to this pristine environment as possible. Let’s hope that the CDRS enjoys another fifty years of protecting Ecuador and the Galapagos Islands so that future generations can enjoy them as we have.

Charles Darwin died 130 years ago today, leaving an intellectual legacy which has profoundly influenced the general course of Western thought. He is best known for his work On the Origin of Species (1859) and (1871), both of which introduced radical new ideas for the time concerning the origins of humans and all life. Darwin's last work, however, devoted itself entirely to a more down-to-earth species: the lowly earthworm. In his final book, (1881)L. Sambourne's satiric portrait of Darwin published in Punch, 1881., Darwin concluded, "It may be doubted if there are any other animals which have played such an important part in the history of the world as these lowly organized creatures." If the concept of evolution didn’t give Darwin enough grief from his contemporaries, this monograph on worms provoked even more ridicule. But Darwin had the last laugh: The book was a runaway best-seller. Although its title would never fly with today's publishers, the book nevertheless sold more copies than his earlier books, due largely to England's healthy obsession with gardening. The Tower of Babel? No, one of the more elegant illustrations of worm poop (or castings) published by DarwinWith the help of his children, with whom he set out early each morning (and often on rainy nights) while the ground was still cool and moist, Darwin observed and recorded the habits of the earthworm and its effect on soil formation. Darwin learned that worms literally move the earth in the process of their meanderings. Their passage through the earth aerates the soil and the natural chemistry of their guts renders soil and plant matter into fertile pellets. As a by-product of their movements, worms deposit new soil on the surface, causing whatever was on top to slowly submerge. Thus, whole monuments may be buried over a period of decades. It is estimated that for a single acre of cultivated land, earthworms move 8 tons of earth in a year, enough to produce a new layer of earth 2 inches thick, rich in nitrogen, phosphorous and calcium. Before the plough, the earthworm was the earth’s best tiller, as it digested earth and munched on leaves, leaving behind a rich hummus layer. Vermiculture enthusiasts will agree that worm juice (or "compost tea") collected beneath their compost bins is a superior organic fertilizing agent for their gardens.

Darwin Discovers Natural Selection in the Galapagos Much can be read into the full title of Charles Darwin's great work, which is 'On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life'. It is effectively one long argument in support of his theory as to how and why species come about, resulting a huge leap in our understanding of the natural world and our role in it. The Galapagos Islands are inextricably linked to Charles Darwin. If you go on a Galapagos liveaboard you will learn a great deal about Darwin's studies here. There is a Charles Darwin research centre in Santa Cruz and his musings on tortoises, finches, marine iguanas and more are quoted everywhere. Had he been trained in scuba, he would undoubtedly have marvelled just as much at the amazing abundance and variety of sea-life that can be witnessed when diving Galapagos! Undoubtedly his travels contributed greatly to his work, but it is easy to overstate the role played by 'The Voyage of the Beagle'. While this may have been instrumental in broadening Darwin's mind and ways of thinking, there was no 'Eureka' moment as he stood on the rocky shores of the Galapagos Islands. We may love the thought of the young Darwin staring at some finch samples on board the Beagle and banging his desk with glee as everything fell into place in his mind. However the truth is that it took Darwin many more years, deeper study and less glamorous scientific endeavour for his great work to become crystallised into the contents of 'On the Origin of Species'. A humble chalk bank in Kent, England near his home played a role as vital, if not considerably more so, than any of the stops on his exciting voyage on HMS Beagle. "It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, gloved with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us." In so writing he was unleashing a new view of nature. One is of which man was not made "in the image and likeness of God", but was simply part of the great tree of life. A father of 10 children, 7 of whom survived to adulthood, Darwin saw his human family as part of the mammal family and as an intrinsic part of the living world, and not apart from it. This conclusion was only arrived at following years of painstaking study and inner conflict, and was kept in a private notebook not to be shared with the wider world until the publication of his great work.