"Can species change? Or go extinct? In the eighteenth century, most people answer no to both questions. But in the century that follows, that certainty gets challenged as some people in Europe question the common belief that all creatures are the same as they've been since life's creation. The Evolution of an Idea, the second volume of Discovering Life's Story, opens with the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus, who attempts to create an organizing system for the myriad forms of life on earth. It c

"Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species appeared a little more than 150 years ago. Although Darwin had already been developing his theory for more than twenty years and others before him had advocated evolutionary views, the book was transformative and marked the beginning of the development of evolutionary biology. The story of the development of evolutionary theory over the last century and a half is fascinating and conceptually rich; it has involved repeated modification, clarification, ex

"By early morning of June 30, 1860, a large crowd began to congregate in front of Oxford University's brand-new Museum of Natural History. The occasion was the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, and the subject of discussion was Charles Darwin's new treatise: fact or fiction? Darwin, a simultaneously reclusive and intellectually audacious squire from Kent, claimed to have solved 'that mystery of mysteries,' introducing a logical explanation of the origin of