Wistar and DNA Day: A Fifty-Year Fuse Under Neo-Darwinism

Today, as we noted on Friday, marks two momentous anniversaries -- of the elucidation of the structure of the DNA molecule by Watson and Crick (they published in the journal Nature on April 25, 1953), and that of the opening of the Wistar Institute conference on "Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution" (1966).

The latter, if only because fifty years is a nice round number and because Wistar is less familiar to the public, may for us be the more significant...