Charles Darwin was born Feb. 12, 1809. With the publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859, Darwin took his place alongside the likes of Copernicus, Newton, Kepler and (later) Einstein as the greatest of the great scientific thinkers. His place in that pantheon is secured by the fact that, 150 years later, the basic theory that he developed is the central organizing theory of at least a dozen fields of science. It's difficult to even imagine hypothetically what such fields as biology, paleontology, comparative anatomy, or anthropology would look like today without evolutionary theory as the central idea to explain the enormous mountain of data in each of those fields. Indeed, little would make sense in the entire natural history of life on earth without it. Happy Birthday, Chuck. You did good.