Charles Darwin would undoubtedly be both pleased and chagrined. The famous scientist would be pleased because a study published online this week provides the first clear evidence that natural selection, his favored mechanism of evolution, drives the process of species formation in a wide variety of plants and animals. But he would be chagrined because it has taken nearly 150 years to do so. What Darwin did in his revolutionary treatise, “On the Origin of Species,” was to explain how much of the extraordinary variety of biological traits possessed by plants and animals arises from a single process, natural selection....
