 published 50 years before "Origin," Novacek explained.
Paley asserted that living organisms are so complex and refined that there must be some divine creator behind their design and creation.
"Darwin would probably say, this looks like history repeating itself. This is a little déjà vu," Novacek said. "He would say, 'Here we go again.'"
Happy but also shocked
Chris Beard, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, agreed that Darwin would be happy, and then some, to see how his theory has been sustained and elaborated on since "Origin" was published.
"I think he would perhaps even be shocked to see how well it has held up and to see how the theory itself has evolved through time to encompass new technologies, the modern science of sequencing entire genomes," Beard said.
Mohamed Noor, associate chair of biology at Duke University in North Carolina, said advances in genetics , in particular, would truly excite Darwin.
"Today, researchers are finding actual genes that cause species-forming traits like hybrid infertility," said Noor, who is traveling this week to London where he will receive the Linnean Society's prestigious Darwin-Wallace Medal for making "major advances in evolutionary biology."
"We are using 'genome sequences' to show that natural selection is pervasive in its effects and that it has contributed to the formation of new species," Noor told LiveScience. "It's truly an exciting time to be an evolutionary biologist, and Darwin would surely be equally excited."
'Surprised' and 'disappointed' at progress
The contemporary controversy over teaching evolution in some parts of the United States and in a handful of other nations would shock Darwin, Beard said.
"I think he was someone who had enough confidence in the power of progress that is inherent in the human mind that he would have assumed that we would be past this by now," Beard said. "In most parts of the world we are. It's mainly us here in America and, oddly enough, people in the Muslim world, who have problems with Darwinian evolution. I think he would be surprised and disappointed that society, frankly, has not made more progress in absorbing the power and, in many ways, the beauty of his theory."
But Darwin would be very pleased to find that there is no controversy in science today about whether evolution occurred, despite continual attempts by creationists to manufacture one, said science historian Richard Milner.
"He would have been delighted, I believe, that the debates within evolutionary biology are now about the why and how of evolution — a continuation of some of the disputes he had with his friend Thomas Huxley about the limits and efficacy of natural selection," Milner said.
Milner continued: "Also, I think he would have been astounded at the some of the twists and turns of modern theory: endosymbiosis (cells made up of combinations of critters), lateral gene transfer (a challenge to the vertical tree of life), self-organization (the mystery of how cells combine into larger entities).
"Also, the science of genetics, which originated after his death, would have opened a whole new window for him: how genes work, either as 'blueprints' or 'switches,' the 'junk DNA' that turns out not to be junk at all, and the question of whether organic forms are shaped as embryos by some kind of organic origami."
What would Darwin do?
Novacek and Beard offered the following visions for how Darwin might spend his time as a scientist if he were alive today.
Beard: "If I were to speculate, I would think that Darwin would be a modern field biologist, which is what he was in his own time. He devoted a huge amount of his youth to the Beagle voyage and he clearly loved going out in to the field and collecting living animals and plants and collecting fossils, and he enjoyed observing living animals and plants and figuring out how they adapted their anatomy to the environment ...
"By the same token, it is possible that he could be fascinated by scientific and technological advances, and morph into somebody who wears a whi