Cool.

Even Google does Darwin Day.

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Guest Blogger: Charles Darwin

In honor of the old man’s 200th, Myrmecos Blog is proud to feature Charles Darwin writing prophetically about the problems posed by social insects for his theory of natural selection.   The passage below is from the first edition of On the Origin of Species, and in it Darwin anticipates the same answers- kin and group selection- that later generations of biologists converged on to solve the riddle. Not bad for a barnacle taxonomist…

No doubt many instincts of very difficult explanation could be opposed to the theory of natural selection,—cases, in which we cannot see how an instinct could possibly have originated; cases, in which no intermediate gradations are known to exist; cases of instinct of apparently such trifling importance, that they could hardly have been acted on by natural selection; cases of instincts almost identically the same in animals so remote in the scale of nature, that we cannot account for their similarity by inheritance from a common parent, and must therefore believe that they have been acquired by independent acts of natural selection. I will not here enter on these several cases, but will confine myself to one special difficulty, which at first appeared to me insuperable, and actually fatal to my whole theory. I allude to the neuters or sterile females in insect-communities: for these neuters often differ widely in instinct and in structure from both the males and fertile females, and yet, from being sterile, they cannot propagate their kind.

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Kin Selection Rescued by Phylogenetics?

30 years ago, biologists thought they’d solved one of Darwin’s thorniest problems, the evolution of sterile social insects:

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Darwin’s Birthday

Today is Charles Darwin’s 199th birthday. Aussie blogger John Wilkins provides an eloquent summation of Darwin’s significance:

So remember Darwin not as the discoverer of anything, but as the guy who set off a fruitful, active, complex and ultimately explanatory research program in biology, which continues to become ever more active. Don’t make him a saint, an authority, or a hero. He’s just a damned good scientist.

Other Darwin miscellanea on the web: For the celebration-minded, Darwinday.org lists local Darwin-related events. The Beagle Project aims to recreate the Voyage of the Beagle, in 2009. And, the complete works of Darwin are available at Darwin-Online.

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