When The Theory Was New

It was Darwin's 200th birthday this week. In 1860 The Atlantic reviewed On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. Money quote:

All this we pondered, and could not much object to. In fact, we began to contract a liking for a system which at the outset illustrates the advantages of good breeding, and which makes the most "of every creature's best."

The best contemporary review I've read of where Darwin scholarship now is Matt Ridley's piece in National Geographic. Money quote:

Take blue eyes. Darwin, like many Europeans, had blue eyes. In early 2008, Hans Eiberg and his colleagues at the University of Copenhagen announced that they had found the genetic mutation common to all pure blue-eyed people. The mutation is a single letter change, from A to G, on the long arm of chromosome 15, which dampens the expression of a gene called OCA2, involved in the manufacture of the pigment that darkens the eyes. By comparing the DNA of Danes with that of people from Turkey and Jordan, Eiberg calculated that this mutation happened only about 6,000-10,000 years ago, well after the invention of agriculture, in a particular individual somewhere around the Black Sea. So Darwin may have gotten his blue eyes because of a single misspelled letter in the DNA in the baby of a Neolithic farmer.

6,000 years is a very short period of time in the grand scheme of things. And yet blue eyes are part of our understanding of what it means to be human today. Our discovery of how much faster evolution can be than we once imagined is arguably one of the deeper shifts in human consciousness in recent times. And it has yet to be absorbed.

(Photo: A US stamp of Sinatra, by Gabriel Bouys/Getty.)