Sign up to The Irish Times Archive (1859 - 2008)My Account »

NOVEMBER 24th will mark the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, in which Charles Darwin spelt out the famous theory. The big discovery, made by Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, was not evolution itself, but the mechanism through which it works – natural selection. Some people still challenge the theory, despite it having received massive scientific validation. A recent publication entitled 15 Evolutionary Gemsby H Gee, R Howlett and P Campbell (www.nature.com/nature/newspdf/

evolutiongems.pdf) briefly describes 15 examples published in the journal Natureover the past decade that offer powerful evidence for the theory. I will describe three examples.