Status Updates From Evolution: The Triumph of a...

Instead of eradicating diseases,[biologist Paul]Ewald argues,we may have more luck trying to domesticate them.It wouldn't be the 1st time we've domesticated natural enemies."Wolves have been harmful to us throughout our evolutionary history,"says Ewald,"but we've been living with some wolves which have evolved into dogs.Instead of harming us, they now..help us.I think we can do the same thing with..disease organisms.

The biologist J. S. B. Haldane liked to say that if biology had taught him anything about the nature of the Creator, it was that he had "an inordinate fondness for beetles."

The diversity of life is like a field full of fireflies, each flash representing a species....Extinction is the dark counterpart to evolution's creativity.

But Victorian biologists knew that if there was [an] imperative for progress many animals were ignoring it. Barnacles, for example, descended from free-swimming crustaceans, but they had given up that independent life for a lazy existence clamped to..a ship hull...Ray Lankester...worried that degeneration could strike human society. "Perhaps we are all drifting towards the condition of intellectual barnacles."

In fact, legs and toes evolved on fish millions of years before they left the water.

Four billion years ago, a new form of matter emerged on this planet: a substance that could store information and replicate itself, that could survive as that information gradually changed. We humans are made of that mutable stuff, but we may now be carrying its laws into new forms, into silicon and plastic, into binary streams of energy.

There is a grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on, according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and wonderful have been, and are being, evolved. -- Charles Darwin, in On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection

Charles [Darwin] drafted a pro and con balance sheet. He wrote "Marry"on the left side, and "Not Marry"on the right, and "This is the question" in the middle. This nuptial Hamlet reasoned that as a single man he would have more time for science...on the other hand a wife would offer "female chit-chat" and constant companionship in old age. He added up the columns and made his conclusion: "Marry-Marry-Marry. Q.E.D."