Science has announced their choice for the most important, the most fundamental, the most revolutionary scientific breakthrough of 2005…and their choice is evolution.

You're saying "Hold it! That was a breakthrough 146 years ago, not today!" Haven't you been listening to what I've been saying, though? We're seeing big advances in evolutionary biology. We're on the edge of a Renaissance in the discipline, if we're not already in the middle of it.

I think the announcement is open to non-subscribers, but here's the beginning, just in case it's not.

The big breakthrough, of course, was the one Charles Darwin made a century and a half ago. By recognizing how natural selection shapes the diversity of life, he transformed how biologists view the world. But like all pivotal discoveries, Darwin's was a beginning. In the years since the 1859 publication of The Origin of Species, thousands of researchers have sketched life's transitions and explored aspects of evolution Darwin never knew.

Today evolution is the foundation of all biology, so basic and all-pervasive that scientists sometimes take its importance for granted. At some level every discovery in biology and medicine rests on it, in much the same way that all terrestrial vertebrates can trace their ancestry back to the first bold fishes to explore land. Each year, researchers worldwide discover enough extraordinary findings tied to evolutionary thinking to fill a book many times as thick as all of Darwin's works put together. This year's volume might start with a proposed rearrangement of the microbes at the base of the tree of life and end with the discovery of 190-million-year-old dinosaur embryos.

Amid this outpouring of results, 2005 stands out as a banner year for uncovering the intricacies of how evolution actually proceeds. Concrete genome data allowed researchers to start pinning down the molecular modifications that drive evolutionary change in organisms from viruses to primates. Painstaking field observations shed new light on how populations diverge to form new species--the mystery of mysteries that baffled Darwin himself. Ironically, also this year some segments of American society fought to dilute the teaching of even the basic facts of evolution. With all this in mind, Science has decided to put Darwin in the spotlight by saluting several dramatic discoveries, each of which reveals the laws of evolution in action.

They single out the chimp genome sequence, new discoveries in human evolution, new ideas and evidence in speciation, and the evolution of the flu virus as highlights.

There's also a video presentation online. It seems to be busy, busy, busy right now and I've only been able to watch half of it—it's talking heads, but still, several good summaries of the significance.