The standard history of evolutionary biology – the history I myself was writing some two or more decades ago – runs something like this: In the Origin of Species, published in 1859, Charles Darwin tried to do two things. First, he wanted to establish the fact of evolution. Second, he proposed a mechanism for evolution – natural selection brought on by a struggle for existence. Darwin was successful in his first aim. Very soon after the publication of his book, most of the educated world – scientists and laypeople – was converted to evolutionism. It became the accepted way of thinking about life's origins, including our own. Darwin was unsuccessful in his second aim. Almost no one took up natural selection as a working cause of evolutionary change – rather, a host of alternatives were preferred, including Lamarckism (the inheritance of acquired characteristics), saltationism (evolution by jumps), orthogenesis (lines of development that take on their own momentum), and others. The triumph of selection as a mechanism had to wait until the twentieth century. It was only then that biologists made the required major advances in our understanding of the mechanisms of heredity and developed the science now known as “genetics.”