Rebuilding the heart in Darwin's year: stem cell therapies in a Darwinian context.

The present paper tries to honour Charles Darwin's memory in the year in which the world celebrates the 200 anniversary of his birth and the 150 of the publication of The Origin of Species. After pointing out that the basis of his theory of evolution, "improvement of species", is a time-dependent concept, commenting on the role that atrophied organs played in Darwin's work and relating this with Darwinian medicine, it is suggested that stem cell and cardiovascular therapies could be perhaps connected with some of the ideas and possibilities already envisaged by Darwin and mentioned in one of his books, The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication (1868).