Charles Darwin's "On the Origin of Species" shook the foundations of how people viewed the world. No longer was the world around us to be taken as falling into permanently fixed categories, but everything could be seen as changing. Just as Copernicus had taken the earth out of the center of the solar system, Darwin’s work would question humankind’s centrality in the creation. In this course students will explore the thinking that set the stage of Darwin’s revolutionary work and then explore his work in great detail. The course will then progress into the 20th-century where breakthroughs in genetics beginning with Watson and Crick's elucidation of DNA's structure, unveiled the molecular basis of inheritance. Contributions by Beadle and Tatum on gene function, and Jacob and Monod's research on gene regulation, further highlight the complexities of genetic mechanisms. This course brings students through pivotal moments in the development of modern biological science, showing how these discoveries have fundamentally changed our perception of our nature and the world.