The most famous biologist of all time was born 198 years ago today. As a boy, Charles Darwin considered becoming a parson or a doctor. But a love of science soon consumed him and his course was set to become a naturalist. At age 22, unfulfilled and restless with youth, he took advantage of an offer to sail the exotic south Pacific on a ship called the H.M.S. Beagle.
Upon his return, he poured over the wealth of zoological data he had meticulously recorded. Darwin's burgeoning thesis was elegant: If humans could breed wolves into poodles using artificial selection in a few thousand years, couldn't nature select for even greater changes in species over eons? On November 24, 1859, he formally published those ideas in a book that would shake the scientific establishment, along with all western culture, to the core: The Origin of Species. The book sold out within minutes of hitting the shelves.
Since Darwin's time, science has uncovered insights into the origin of life on earth that would have astonished and delighted him. The eukaryotic cells in the bodies of all animals carry that evolutionary legacy written in genetic code. Some of the tiny organelles found in those cells may have started as out as free living organisms, which were domesticated by natural selection into a sort of microbial co-op billions of years ago. 
The remains of fish that evolved limbs1 300 million years ago (right), and whale ancestors that lost their legs 250 million years later, have been unearthed from their rocky tombs.
Fossils of adorable egg-laying mammal-like reptiles2 from over 200 million years ago (left), whose descendants would give rise to every living mammal including humans, have been found. And from strata in China, feathered dinosaurs3 of the Cretaceous, cousin to all modern birds, have come to light. 
Despite the mountains of evidence for common descent, to this day many people reject Darwin's ideas, usually on religious grounds. Entire ideological industries, mostly fueled by the ultra conservative wing of the Republican Party, feeds on that manufactured conflict. And the crux of that denial hinges on the glaring paradox that the intricate universe science reveals somehow challenges the existence of the Creator who crafted it.
Even as a skeptic, I cannot imagine greater testimony to the brilliance of a Creator than a myriad of dazzling, complex processes unfolding over vast oceans of space and time in exquisite order, spanning the entire cosmos. If I were a Pastor, I'd encourage my congregation to rejoice in the diversity of God's marvelous creatures and be thankful for the amazingly elaborate biochemical mechanisms those ancestral benefactors endowed us with. They would never again have to fear that science would undermine their faith. Indeed, if anything, the grandeur of the natural world would only serve to strengthen it.
I'd praise our Darwinian origins and be grateful for our Linnaean ancestors, from the primates to the microbes and, yes, all they way back to the comets and the rocks and the dust. For through them God bequeathed unto us the finest natural wonders we will ever know: our bodies, our brains, and our world.
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