Foreword.- Part I: Historical Perspectives.- Darwin-Wallace paradigm shift: The ten days that failed to shake the world.- From Copernicus to Darwin.- Part II: A Microbial World.- A Vestige of an RNA Apparatus with Ribozyme Capabilities Embedded and Functions within the Modern Ribosome.- Covering all the Bases: the Promise of Genome-Wide Sequence Data for Large Population Samples of Bacteria.- Role of Symbiosis in Evolution.- Part III: Early Eukaryotes.- The Evolutionary Origin of Animals and Fungi.- Written in stone: The fossil record of early eukaryotes.- Endosymbiosis in the origin of eukaryotes.- Symbiogenetics: Proposal for a new science.- Part IV: A Planet of Animals and Plants.- Epochal change: sweltering climate at the Paleocene/Eocene boundary (55 million years ago).- Speciation and evolution of Darwin's finches.- Ecological Selection and the Evolution of Body Size and Sexual Size Dimorphism in the Galapagos Flightless Cormorant.- Index.