Darwin

Read the yearly supplement of The Lancet during the weekend. The subtitle of this year is Darwin's Gift - it is a collection of papers celebrating the bicentennial birth on the giant in evolution.

(The supplement is, somewhat surprisingly, the most enjoyable one in the past five or six years.)

It is often stated that the author of On the Origin of Species was the pioneer of the theory of evolution. That's not entirely correct - the hypothesis of evolution had been around for half a century before his time. His real breakthrough was the proposal of natural selection as the cause of evolution. The theory always reminds me a saying of Arthur Schopenhauer:

All truth passes through three stages:

• First, it is ridiculed.
• Second, it is violently opposed.
• Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.
  

PS. In his blog, my friend VW is beginning a series on evolution. Interested readers may like to have a look. The address is: http://vwswong.blogspot.com/