“In a few scrawled notes to a friend, biologist Charles Darwin theorised how life began. Not only was it probably correct, his theory was a century ahead of its time.

"Charles Darwin had some rather good ideas. His most famous is the theory of evolution by natural selection, which explains much of what we know about life on Earth. But he also pondered many other questions. In a hasty letter to a friend, he put forward an idea about how the first life might have formed. Some 150 years later, that letter looks remarkably prescient – maybe even prophetic.

Contrary to popular belief, Darwin was not the first to propose that species evolve. The idea that animal populations change over time, so that for instance giraffes today have longer necks than their distant ancestors, was much discussed in the 1800s.(...)” (Lido em: BBCNews 2020-11-14)