Science

Happy Birthday, Darwin

Researchers still decoding his theory of natural selection.

The man who introduced the world to On the Origin of Species was born 200 years ago today, and yet the world is only now catching up to his discoveries. Since Charles Darwin was initially hesitant to explore the whys and hows of natural selection, scientists are only now discovering how certain features—the size of our limbs and brains, the enzymes in our spit and stomachs, the color of our skin, the contour of our hair—are the products of evolutionary adaptation, writes the Washington Post. "We are really just beginning to see the landscape of human evolution. We're working toward a coherent picture of how we evolved over time," said Pardis Christine Sabeti, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard University.