Dialogues with Darwin: An Exhibition of Historical Documents and Contemporary Art

Before Darwin, many naturalists believed that plants and animals were unchanging, designed and created once and for all for a specific environment. Others believed that organisms changed in response to their environment by becoming more complex in form over many generations.

Darwin’s theory differed from these earlier ideas. He identified a process called “natural selection.” The key was not that organisms changed by adapting to a given environment, but rather that a given environment favored certain organisms, and those organisms would survive at a higher rate and pass on their traits. Eventually, he argued, this process produced new species, and it accounted for the history of all life on earth over many millions of years.

Three Principles of Natural Selection:

• Organisms produce offspring with different traits, which can be inherited.
• Organisms produce more offspring than can survive because the world has limited resources.
• Offspring whose traits are best suited to their environment survive and pass on those variations to their offspring.

Correcting Misconceptions about Evolution:

• Organisms do not progress from less evolved to more evolved. Humans and insects are equally evolved.
• Present-day humans are not evolved from present-day apes. Both evolved from a common ancestor now extinct.
• Evolution is not random. While variations in inherited traits are random, natural selection is not.