Hairless dogs have imperfect teeth; long-haired and coarse-haired animals are apt to have, as is asserted, long or many horns; pigeons with feathered feet have skin between their outer toes; pigeons with short beaks have small feet, and those with long beaks large feet. Hence if man goes on selecting, and thus augmenting any peculiarity, he will almost certainly modify unintentionally other parts of the structure, owing to the mysterious laws of correlation. –Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (1859)

Evolutionary biology is a living science. As the scientific world celebrates the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Origin of Species, this simple fact is perhaps the most difficult to get across to a skeptical public. The lack of broad acceptance of evolution has many causes, but perhaps the most maddening is the widely-held notion that Charles Darwin had only one idea (natural selection), which, though it has long since been found wanting (the argument goes), has been used by his successors to account for every conceivable event in the history of life on the basis of nothing more than the incomplete fossil record.

That the richness of modern evolutionary theory—informed now by a flood of molecular and genomic data—is poorly conveyed to high school and university students seems inarguable. In a 2005 correspondence in Nature, Michael Lynch noted that most students are not exposed to the rigorously quantitative nature of much of population genetics, which furthers the impression that evolution is “one of the softer areas of science.” It's heartening to see some steps being taken to address this problem. Sean Carroll has written accessible books for a general audience, introducing evolutionary genetics and 'evo-devo' approaches. At the university level, the new evolution textbook by Barton et al. provides perhaps the most thorough integration of evolution and quantitative genetics yet, and one hopes that it's widely adopted.

These resources could serve as stepping stones to the primary literature, which, on a weekly basis, provides evidence of the richness of the 150-year-long research program inspired by Darwin and Wallace. Not everyone will be regularly reading PNAS and Evolution, of course, but our colleagues at Nature have compiled “15 Evolutionary Gems”—a series of stellar evolutionary biology papers published in the last decade in Nature, complete with helpful summaries.

This issue of Nature Genetics also highlights a Darwinian question, in particular, the one outlined in the quote highlighted above. Although Darwin was not the first naturalist to show interest in the 'laws of correlation', its inclusion in the Origin suggests how much pleiotropy, as we would call it, is intertwined with evolvability. The two papers on pages 299 and 371 from Trudy Mackay and colleagues provide new insight into the molecular basis of pleiotropy in the context of complex traits in Drosophila. Together, the two papers show that several hundred transcripts are associated with phenotypic variation of each of the behavioral and life-history traits they examined. Previous work in Nature (452, 470–473; 2008) and in this journal (41, 166–167; 2009) suggests that the extent of genetic buffering is such that mutations affecting transcript levels of many of these genes may in the end have little phenotypic effect. Although these are still early days, the integration of studies of pleiotropy and genetic buffering should provide an unprecedented molecular view of the course of, and constraints on, evolution. That we are just now getting answers to questions that were central to Darwin's argument—that there is great ferment in the field—should be seen as a great strength of evolutionary studies.

As for the man himself, we'll let William Bateson have the last word. In his essay “Hereditary and Variation in Modern Lights,” written in 1909 to commemorate the centenary of Darwin's birth, he said: “When we reflect on the intricacies of genetic problems as we must now conceive them there come moments when we feel almost thankful that the Mendelian principles were unknown to Darwin. The time called for a bold pronouncement, and he made it, to our lasting profit and delight.”