begin rant

Well, happy Darwin Day all over again. Had the man survived like his work has, he would now be a year shy of two hundred years old, and all the stronger for it. Next year, his Origin of the Species will be one hundred and fifty years old - and while it has undergone considerable refinement as additional data has been collected, the central tenets of his observations about the processes affecting populations over time still remain the same:

1. Individuals within populations must possess variable traits. For whatever reason, not all critters are identical. Some of us are slightly taller than others, or shorter, or hairier, or a slightly different shade of mauve.
2. These variations must result in differential performance. Maybe being shorter helps you hide in your burrow and helps you avoid being eaten by hairier folks, or by being slightly more mauve you are slightly more attractive. Performance is often measured in terms of reproductive output, because the ability to reproduce yourself and to continue or expand your lineage into the future is the only real measure of "success" for a population.
3. These variations must be heritable. It doesn't matter to the population's success over the long term if your individual success cannot be shared with the generations of offspring ahead of you. They must be able to inherit your performance.

And that really is evolution by natural selection in a nutshell. The devil, as always is in the details, and there has been considerable debate about the mechanisms of heredity, or how fast these processes occur - but these central three points have never been overturned. It is hard for me to imagine why these simple and basic principles are considered controversial. They do not imply a moral order to the universe, merely an observation of ongoing processes.