Darwin Day!

February 12, 2018

Today is the 210th birthday of Charles Robert Darwin and February 12th is the unofficial holiday Darwin Day, celebrated by scientists and naturalists around the world as the father of modern biology for his profound and far reaching theory of evolution by natural selection. From the time he was a child Darwin was an enthusiastic naturalist and collector, collecting beetles and seashells at a very young age and learning taxidermy from John Edmonstone, a freed black slave and accomplished naturalist. Darwin’s celebrated five year voyage on the H.M.S. Beagle established him as a respected geologist and researcher in Victorian England and became the foundational experience for his life’s work. In 1837 in his personal notebook, Darwin jotted down his first branching tree of life next to the enigmatic words “I think”, planting the seeds of what would prove to be one of the most profound and controversial ideas in all of science, indeed in all of human history. So controversial in fact that Darwin kept his extensive research mostly to himself for well over 20 years, not publishing The Origin of Species until 1859 after the research of Alfred Russel Wallace had reached the same conclusions as Darwin. Most people are familiar with Darwin’s observations of Galápagos finches and tortoises or domesticated pigeons and horses, but his observations and conclusions are far reaching and draw on research from the fossil record, population dynamics, economics, and almost every area of modern research. 160 years after its publication The Origin of Species remains one of the most profound scientific insights in human history and has been reaffirmed in ways Darwin could not have imagined; molecular biology, immunology, chemistry, geography, geology have only served to reaffirm what may be the single most heavily criticized and vigorously attacked ideas in human history. And yet it stands as one of the crowning achievements of human thought and insight. So today take a second to throw one back for the grand daddy to all of us nature nerds and weirdo collectors and give a shout out to one of the greatest minds that ever lived, happy Darwin Day!