Darwin’s Magnificient Mystery and the Microbiome
Darwin’s On the Origin of Species put forth a seminal and revolutionary thesis for the life sciences in 1859: Populations with a common ancestor evolve over time with enough change to become different species that no longer successfully interbreed. This process of descent with modification continues over time to produce lineages of new species. Darwin famously referred to the process of one species becoming two as “the mystery of mysteries.”
More than 160 years later, the life sciences are experiencing a second revolution based on the newly appreciated knowledge that all plant and animal species are stable or temporary hosts to a microbiome living in or on the body.
An essay and literature review first authored by SyBBURE scholar and biological sciences undergraduate Asia Miller and co-authored by Seth Bordenstein, Centennial Chair in Biological Sciences, professor of biological sciences and director of the Vanderbilt Microbiome Innovation Center, imagines how some chapters in Darwin’s Origin of Species would look with our current understanding of the host-associated microbiome.