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It was a shock to people of the nineteenth century when they discovered, from observations science had made, that many features of the biological world could be ascribed to the elegant principle of natural selection.

Darwin's idea of natural selection makes people uncomfortable because it reverses the direction of tradition.

Even when Darwin's teaching first made its appearance, it became clear at once that its scientific, materialist core, its teaching concerning the evolution of living nature, was antagonistic to the idealism that reigned in biology.

Darwin recognized the fact that paleontology then seemed to provide evidence against rather for evolution in general or the gradual origin of taxonomic categories in particular.

Evolution thus is merely contingent on certain processes articulated by Darwin: variation and selection.

Geneticists in the early 1900s believed that nature - in an effort to avoid wasting precious space within chromosomes - would pack as many genes into each chromosome as possible.

Progressively thinking biologists, both in our country and abroad, saw in Darwinism the only right road to the further development of scientific biology.

The method of nature: who could ever analyze it?

In the last century, as we learned more about genes, we were able to devise ways of accelerating evolution.

Biology is the study of complicated things that have the appearance of having been designed with a purpose.