What Darwin missed

Throughout his life, Fred Hoyle had a keen interest in evolution. He argued that natural selection by small, random change, as conceived by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, could not explain either the origin of life or the origin of a new protein. The idea of natural selection, Hoyle told us, wasn't even Darwin's original idea in the first place. Here, in honour of Hoyle's analysis, I propose a solution to Hoyle's dilemma. His solution was life from space – panspermia. But the real key to understanding natural selection is `molecular biodiversity'. This explains the things Darwin missed – the origin of species and the origin of extinction. It is also a beautiful example of the mystery disease that afflicted Darwin for over 40 years, for which we now have an answer. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.