Seeing further: the story of science & the Royal Society — 9 RICHARD DAWKINS

1. 1. Darwin's most revolutionary contribution was providing the alternative to chance and design: cumulative natural selection.
2. 2. Patrick Matthew independently discovered natural selection in 1831 but failed to grasp its earth-shattering significance.
3. 3. Alfred Russel Wallace independently arrived at natural selection and immediately recognized its immense importance for all of life.
4. 4. Darwin's four bridges to evolutionary understanding are: stabilizing selection, directional selection, grasping natural selection's explanatory power, and public communication via The Origin.
5. 5. Darwin came tantalizingly close to discovering Mendelian genetics but failed to cross the digital bridge, leaving him vulnerable to Fleeming Jenkin's blending inheritance objection.
6. 6. Neo-Darwinism, or 'digital Darwinism', unites Darwinian evolution with Mendelian genetics: evolution is change in gene frequencies in gene pools.
7. 7. The selfish gene perspective reframes natural selection as the non-random survival of randomly varying coded instructions for survival.