Darwin Celebration/Information Station 2009

[Larv]

But, wait, wasn't Darwin a Creationist? From the conclusion of his The Origin Of Species:

There is grandeur in this view of life with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one: and that, while this planet has gone circling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.

Charles, how could you?

[Galapagos]

Originally Posted by Larv

But, wait, wasn't Darwin a Creationist? From the conclusion of his The Origin Of Species:

There is grandeur in this view of life with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one: and that, while this planet has gone circling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.

Charles, how could you?

That word "Creator" was actually added in the later editions of "On The Origin of Species".

It is not quite clear what Darwin believed, but he certainly wasn't a very convinced deist if he was one, and considered himself an agnostic later in life(atheism and agnosticism are not mutually exclusive, and it appears that both labels may apply to Darwin based on his various statements).
There is actually an entire section of his autobiography available for free online in which he discusses, and dismisses various arguments for the existence of gods:
http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/...ief&pageseq=87

Originally Posted by Darwin

Although I did not think much about the existence of a personal God until a considerably later period of my life, I will here give the vague conclusions to which I have been driven. The old argument of design in nature, as given by Paley, which formerly seemed to me so conclusive, fails, now that the law of natural selection has been discovered. We can no longer argue that, for instance, the beautiful hinge of a bivalve shell must have been made by an intelligent being, like the hinge of a door by man. There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings and in the action of natural selection, than in the course which the wind blows. Everything in nature is the result of fixed laws.
[...]
That there is much suffering in the world no one disputes. Some have attempted to explain this in reference to man by imagining that it serves for his moral improvement. But the number of men in the world is as nothing compared with that of all other sentient beings, and these often suffer greatly without any moral improvement. A being so powerful and so full of knowledge as a God who could create the universe, is to our finite minds omnipotent and omniscient, and it revolts our understanding to suppose that his benevolence is not unbounded, for what advantage can there be in the sufferings of millions of the lower animals throughout almost endless time? This very old argument from the existence of suffering against the existence of an intelligent first cause seems to me a strong one; whereas, as just remarked, the presence of much suffering agrees well with the view that all organic beings have been developed through variation and natural selection.
[...]
With respect to immortality,1 nothing shows me how strong and almost instinctive a belief it is, as the consideration of the view now held by most physicists, namely that the sun with all the planets will in time grow too cold for life, unless indeed some great body dashes into the sun and thus gives it fresh life.—Believing as I do that man in the distant future will be a far more perfect creature than he now is, it is an intolerable thought that he and all other sentient beings are doomed to complete annihilation after such long-continued slow progress. To those who fully admit the immortality of the human soul, the destruction of our world will not appear so dreadful.
Another source of conviction in the existence of God, connected with the reason and not with the feelings, impresses me as having much more weight. This follows from the extreme difficulty or rather impossibility of conceiving this immense and wonderful universe, including man with his capacity of looking far backwards and far into futurity, as the result of blind chance or necessity. When thus reflecting I feel compelled to look to a First Cause having an intelligent mind in some degree analogous to that of man; and I deserve to be called a Theist.

This conclusion1 was strong in my mind about the time, as far as I can remember, when I wrote the Origin of Species; and it is since that time that it has very gradually with many fluctuations become weaker. But then arises the doubt—can the mind of man, which has, as I fully believe, been developed from a mind as low as that possessed by the lowest animal, be trusted when it draws such grand conclusions? May not these be the result of the connection between cause and effect which strikes us as a necessary one, but probably depends merely on inherited experience? Nor must we overlook the probability of the constant inculcation in a belief in God on the minds of children producing so strong and perhaps an inherited effect on their brains not yet fully developed, that it would be as difficult for them to throw off their belief in God, as for a monkey to throw off its instinctive fear and hatred of a snake.2

I cannot pretend to throw the least light on such abstruse problems. The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to remain an Agnostic.
[...]
Nothing1 is more remarkable than the spread of scepticism or rationalism during the latter half of my life. Before I was engaged to be married, my father advised me to conceal carefully my doubts, for he said that he had known extreme misery thus caused with married persons.

I believe Darwin was confused and full of doubt, and that much of what he thought was not said outright out of respect for the religious belief of his wife and contemporaries.
More is revealed from some of his private letters:

Originally Posted by Darwin

Darwin Correspondence Project - Letter 2814 — Darwin, C. R. to Gray, Asa, 22 May [1860]
With respect to the theological view of the question; this is always painful to me.-- I am bewildered.-- I had no intention to write atheistically. But I own that I cannot see, as plainly as others do, & as I shd wish to do, evidence of design & beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent & omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae symbol with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice. Not believing this, I see no necessity in the belief that the eye was expressly designed. On the other hand I cannot anyhow be contented to view this wonderful universe & especially the nature of man, & to conclude that everything is the result of brute force. I am inclined to look at everything as resulting from designed laws, with the details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we may call chance. Not that this notion at all satisfies me. I feel most deeply that the whole subject is too profound for the human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton. Let each man hope & believe what he can.--

Certainly I agree with you that my views are not at all necessarily atheistical. The lightning kills a man, whether a good one or bad one, owing to the excessively complex action of natural laws,--a child (who may turn out an idiot) is born by action of even more complex laws,--and I can see no reason, why a man, or other animal, may not have been aboriginally produced by other laws; & that all these laws may have been expressly designed by an omniscient Creator, who foresaw every future event & consequence. But the more I think the more bewildered I become; as indeed I have probably shown by this letter.

He is referring to a parasitic wasp in the above paragraph, the Ichneumonidae. A description of how this creature makes a living can be found here:

Originally Posted by Dawkins

Article Adapted from River Out of Eden
CHARLES DARWIN lost his faith with the help of a wasp. "I cannot persuade myself," Darwin wrote, ---that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars." Actually, Darwin's gradual loss of faith, which he downplayed for fear of upsetting his devout wife Emma, had more complex causes.

His reference to the Ichneumonidae was aphoristic. The macabre habits to which he referred are shared by their cousins the digger wasps. A female digger wasp not only lays her egg in a caterpillar (or grasshopper or bee) so that her larva can feed on it. According to Fabre she also carefully guides her sting into each ganglion of the prey's central nervous system so as to paralyse it but not kill it. This way, the meat keeps fresh.

It is not known whether the paralysis acts as a general anaesthetic, or if it is like curare in just freezing the victim's ability to move. If the latter, the prey might be aware of being eaten alive from inside, but unable to move a muscle to do anything about it. This sounds savagely cruel but nature is not cruel, only pitilessly indifferent. This is one of the hardest lessons for humans to learn. We cannot accept that things might be neither good nor evil, neither cruel nor kind, but simply indifferent to all suffering, lacking all purpose.

Edit--- Also, I just remembered, when Dawkins says above that Darwin lost his faith for more complex reasons, one of them was the loss of his 10 year old daughter Anne to scarlet fever in 1851. IIRC, it was around this time that he stopped going to church services completely, and would spend his Sundays going for long, contemplative walks while his family worshiped.

Double edit- just found the wiki page on Darwin's religious views. More info available there, here is a reference to his daughter as mentioned above:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles..._loss_of_faith
At the end of June 1850 his bright nine year old daughter Annie who had become a particular favourite and comfort to him fell sick and after a painful illness died on 23 April 1851. During Annie's long illness Darwin had read books by Francis William Newman, a Unitarian evolutionist who called for a new post-Christian synthesis and wrote that "the fretfulness of a child is an infinite evil". Darwin wrote at the time, "Our only consolation is that she passed a short, though joyous life." For three years he had deliberated about the Christian meaning of mortality. This opened a new vision of tragically circumstantial nature.[55] His faith in Christianity had already dwindled away and he had stopped going to church.[14] He wrote out his memories of Annie, but no longer believed in an afterlife or in salvation. Emma believed that Annie had gone to heaven and told this to the children, with the unfortunate result that Henrietta wondered, if all the angels were men, did women go to heaven?, and worried for months that her naughtiness while Annie was alive would mean that she would go to hell unless God forgave her.[56]

[Galapagos]

The Smithsonian magazine has a bunch of Darwin special articles up:
The Life and Writings of Charles Darwin | Science & Nature | Smithsonian Magazine

What Darwin Didn't Know | Science & Nature | Smithsonian Magazine
Out of Darwin?s Shadow | Science & Nature | Smithsonian Magazine
Darwin on Lincoln and Vice Versa | History & Archaeology | Smithsonian Magazine
A Naturalist?s Pilgrimage to the Galapagos | Science & Nature | Smithsonian Magazine
At Home with the Darwins | Arts & Culture | Smithsonian Magazine
On the Origin of a Theory | Science & Nature | Smithsonian Magazine
The Evolution of Charles Darwin | Science & Nature | Smithsonian Magazine
Evolution on Trial | Science & Nature | Smithsonian Magazine

I particularly enjoyed the one on Lincoln and Darwin, as I myself have often wondered if these two great men had heard of each others achievements, and what they made of them.

More on the National Geographic specials coming up:

Nat Geo: A Natural Selection Of Marketing Behind Darwin Bicentennial Fare - 2009-02-07 20:21:44 - Multichannel News
National Geographic Channel is commemorating the bicentennial of Charles Darwin's birth with a trio of specials, flanked by digital media and attendant marketing materials.
Sharing a birthday with the 16th U.S. President Abraham Lincoln on Feb. 12, 1809, Darwin wrote the Origin of Species, the groundbreaking book in 1859 that has become a cornerstone of evolutionary theory.

There are good links to interactive pages on the NatGeo site in the above article. Fun stuff!


George Will gave a nod to Darwin in his column recently:

washingtonpost.com
[...]
After Copernicus dislodged humanity from the center of the universe, Marx asserted that false consciousness -- we do not really "make up our minds" -- blinds us to the fact that we are in the grip of an implacable dialectic of impersonal forces. Darwin placed humanity in a continuum of all protoplasm. Then Freud declared that the individual's "self" or personhood is actually a sort of unruly committee. All this dented humanity's self-esteem.

Still, many people of faith find Darwinism compatible with theism: God, they say, initiated and directs the dynamic that Darwin described.

In the end, Darwin, in spite of perfunctory rhetorical references to "the Creator," disagreed. As a scientist dealing with probabilities, and with a profoundly materialist theory, he had no intellectual room for a directing deity that wills a special destination for our species.

Darwin's rejection of premeditated design helped to validate an analogous political philosophy. The fact of order in nature does not require us to postulate a divine Orderer, and the social order does not presuppose an order-giving state. As a practical matter, we cannot expel government from our understanding of society as Darwin expelled God from the understanding of nature. But Darwinism opens the mind to the fecundity of undirected, spontaneous, organic social arrangements -- to Edmund Burke and Friedrich Hayek.

As an interesting side-note, Hayek had kind of a strange view of how cultures persisted through history-- a kind of naive group selection. Interesting paper on this by David Ramsay Steele available here.


Another short, but still interesting piece appeared in SciAm recently:

Darwin 200 years later: Evolution by selection of quotations: Scientific American Blog
"If I were to give an award for the single best idea anyone ever had, I'd give it to Darwin." So wrote philosopher Daniel Dennett in his 1995 book Darwin's Dangerous Idea. "In a single stroke, the idea of evolution by natural selection unifies the realm of life, meaning and purpose with the realm of space and time, cause and effect, mechanism and physical law."

Dennett's musing really hits home to anyone who took introductory biology that did not include evolution: such a course is a giant survey of the different kinds of plants, animals and other organisms of our planet, tied together by a single principle--you needed to know it for the final. But evolution by natural selection ties all life together with process and chemistry. As the great biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky famously, and correctly, said, "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution."

Article on acceptance of Darwin's ideas in America vs UK:

Darwin, Britain's Hero, Is Still Controversial In U.S. : NPR
This year marks the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth, and to say Darwin mania is gripping England does not overstate the case.

The Royal Mint has created a Darwin coin, the Royal Mail has made a Darwin stamp set, and there are countless lectures and exhibitions throughout the country.

Bob Bloomfield is in charge of Darwin200, a program coordinating the celebration. He says there's even a group of knitters paying tribute to Darwin.

"The group created artistic knitted elements which are evocative of evolution processes," says Bloomfield. "Similarly there's a very small group also doing quilts which are doing a Bayeux tapestry of the Beagle voyage."

In other words, Darwin is not the controversial figure in the United Kingdom that he continues to be in the United States. Bloomfield says the reason for this is science has proved Darwin right.

"Unless you want to disregard the weight of evidence, there's not really a controversy," says Bloomfield. "Most difficulties come from people who have a fixed perspective on either the nature of time or either the created nature of the natural world."

[Galapagos]

New videos of Richard Dawkins discussing Darwin on National Geographic:
Part 1:

YouTube - Professor Richard Dawkins on Darwin -...

The rest of the videos can be found on the above linked youtube channel, or on the NatGeo website:
National Geographic Channel UK - The Importance of Charles Darwin

Here's an article from NatGeo about the co-founder of NS, Alfred Russel Wallace:

Wallace ? National Geographic Magazine
The Man Who Wasn't Darwin
Alfred Russel Wallace charted a great dividing line in the living world—and found his own route to the theory of evolution.
By David Quammen

The island of Ternate is a small, graceful volcanic cone rising leafy green from the sea in northeastern Indonesia, 600 miles east of Borneo. Although it's an out-of-the-way place, tucked between much larger islands, Ternate was once an entrepôt of the Dutch empire, from which spices and other precious tropical commodities traveled westward by ship. Today its busy dock area, its fruit and fish markets, its mosques, its old forts, its sultan's palace, and its tidy concrete houses are strung like carousel lights along a single ring road that traces the coastline. Its upland slopes are mostly forested and unpopulated, and in those woods, if you're lucky, you might still spot a certain resplendent bird, emerald-breasted, with two long white plumes dangling capelike from each shoulder, whose scientific name—Semioptera wallacii—honors the man who first brought it to scientific attention. That man was Alfred Russel Wallace, a young English naturalist who did fieldwork throughout the Malay Archipelago in the late 1850s and early '60s. What you won't see on Ternate is any grand plaque or statue commemorating Wallace's place in scientific history or the fact that, from this little island, on March 9, 1858, he sent off a highly consequential letter, aboard a Dutch mail steamer headed westward.

Up next, a couple of articles from Forbes, but a word of warning before proceeding(read this first):
Pharyngula: For shame, Forbes magazine

Okay, so an article by Michael Shermer on Wallace from Forbes:

The Man In Darwin's Shadow - Forbes.com
The Man In Darwin's Shadow
Did Alfred Russel Wallace think up evolution first?
In March of 1858, a Welsh naturalist by the name of Alfred Russel Wallace was in the Malay Archipelago when he had a sudden realization that "there is a general principle in nature which will cause many varieties to survive the parent species and to give rise to successive variations, departing further and further from the original type."

Wallace jotted down his theory in an essay entitled, "On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type" and on March 9, 1858, "sent it by the next post to Mr. Darwin."
When Charles Darwin received the package, he expressed his shock to his friend, the great geologist Charles Lyell, in a letter dated the "18th" and presumed to be June: "I never saw a more striking coincidence. If Wallace had my manuscript sketch written out in 1842, he could not have made a better short extract! Even his terms now stand as heads of my chapters."

This is one of the great moments of independent discovery in the history of science.

Another good one by philosopher Michael Ruse:

In Praise Of A Beautiful Theory - Forbes.com
In Praise Of A Beautiful Theory
Why evolution matters today more than ever.

In this year, 2009, the 200th anniversary of the birth of English naturalist Charles Darwin, let us ask why we should care about evolution, the idea he championed in his book On the Origin of Species, published 150 years ago, in 1859.

The obvious and true answer is that evolution--the descent of all organisms, living and dead and including us humans, by a long, slow, natural process, from just a few forms--is one of the most striking discoveries of all time.

We must see the world, the living world in particular, as something gradually unfurling, interconnected in so many ways. And we must also see that we humans are part and parcel of this story.

Carl Zimmer posted a neat blog update over at the origins blog. This one is on extraterrestrial evolution():

Extraterrestrial Evolution - Origins
Extraterrestrial Evolution

Imagine you spent your whole life on a tiny island, with only some tortoises and snails to give you a clue to what life was like. You'd be forgiven for failing to imagine a Venus flytrap or an armadillo. Evolutionary biologists are in much the same bind. They are, for the time being, stuck on a planetary island, only able to study life on Earth. While life on Earth takes many forms, every living thing is nevertheless a variation on the common theme of DNA, RNA, and protein. What kind of life, if any—exists on other planetary islands we don't know?

More Darwin history for fans/buffs/addicts in a story from the AP:

The Associated Press: On Darwin's 200th, a theory still in controversy
On Darwin's 200th, a theory still in controversy
By GREGORY KATZ

LONDON (AP) — It's well known that Charles Darwin's groundbreaking theory of evolution made many people furious because it contradicted the Biblical view of creation. But few know that it also created problems for Darwin at home with his deeply religious wife, Emma.

Darwin held back the book to avoid offending his wife, said Ruth Padel, the naturalist's great-great-granddaughter. "She said he seemed to be putting God further and further off," Padel said in her north London home. "But they talked it through, and she said, "Don't change any of your ideas for fear of hurting me.'"

The 1859 publication of "On the Origin of Species" changed scientific thought forever — and generated opposition that continues to this day. It is this elegant explanation of how species evolve through natural selection that makes Darwin's 200th birthday on Feb. 12 such a major event.

[Galapagos]

One more day until the Darwin 200! woooooooo

This has been posted elsewhere, but needs to be in this thread for the sake of posterity: Sir David Attenborough's most recent documentary celebrating Darwin and the tree of life:

YouTube - Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life...

A high quality version of the documentary in full is available on the same youtube channel as the preview above.

A bunch of neat Darwin podcasts over at Nature:
Home : Nature podcast
via PZ

Larry Moran was featured in an article in The Star discussing Darwin:

TheStar.com | GTA | Darwin still spurs tributes, debates
Larry Moran has this recurring argument with his daughter – though the two scientists put a unique twist on the usual father-daughter conflict.

He says the man credited with discovering evolution is the greatest scientist the world has known. His daughter – a physicist – favours the man who discovered gravity.

"I say, without hesitation, that (Charles) Darwin was the greatest scientist who ever lived, and I'm happy to debate that with any (Isaac) Newton supporters," says Moran, a biochemistry professor at the University of Toronto.

In fact, in the course of an hour, he says it at least three times.

Parents looking to get their kids thinking about Darwin for the big 200 will enjoy this short comic-style slide show of Darwin as a young naturalist. From NewScientist:

Gallery - Young Darwin's evolution adventures - Image 1 - New Scientist
Young Darwin's evolution adventures

Sadly, few photos remain of Darwin as a young adventurous naturalist, but animator AnneMarie Walsh has created cartoons of some of the key moments.

Here is a video interview with "singing Darwin scholar" Richard Milner:

YouTube - Science: Darwin in Song -...

The NYTimes has a special page up with lots of Darwin articles:
Charles Darwin - News - The New York Times
One of the articles published today aroused responses from Jerry Coyne and PZ Myers.

The Royal Mail in the UK is issuing special stamps honoring Darwin tomorrow:

Royal Mail -- Darwin Stamps
Issue date: 12th February 2009

We’ve created this stunning issue to pay tribute to Charles Darwin, the man who transformed the way many of us think about the natural world.

An extraordinary thinker, Darwin’s findings led him to question our understanding of how life on Earth evolved. This culminated in the publication of On the Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection. Now 200 years after his birth, and 150 years after his findings triggered a debate that still rages today, we celebrate this double anniversary and the man with the revolutionary thoughts with a revolutionary set of stamps. As you can see, these Mint Stamps are far from ordinary. Each stamp has a ‘cut-out’ and ‘peg’ jigsaw design to demonstrate how the various areas of Darwin’s studies came together to inform his theory of Natural Selection.

This is by no means recent, but somewhat related to the above article, and certainly very interesting(at least to the non-UK members). The Bank of England issued £10 bills honoring Darwin:
BBC News | UK | How to join the noteworthy
Bank of England|Banknotes|Current Banknotes|£10
Apparently the fact that Darwin's large beard would be particularly difficult to forge helped influence the decision

One last general article discussing Darwin history and the upcoming celebration, from USAToday:

Darwin celebrated, despite controversy, on 200th birthday - USATODAY.com
Darwin celebrated, despite controversy, on 200th birthday
Charles Darwin would no doubt be surprised to learn that, 127 years after his death, people around the world will be celebrating his 200th birthday on Thursday.

Biology's "reluctant revolutionary," as English historian James Moore calls him, was a quiet man and frequently ill. But there will be nothing low-key about "Darwin Day," the anniversary of the English naturalist's Feb. 12, 1809, birth.

[Galapagos]

John Wilkins over at Evolving Thoughts has put up two noteworthy pieces on Darwin.

One is about a number of Darwin myths, and Wilkins neatly dispatches the first one on the list, that "Darwin did not believe in the reality of species":
Evolving Thoughts: Myths about Darwin

The other one is in a vein similar to the articles by Coyne and Myers linked in my last post itt:
Evolving Thoughts: Not Saint Darwin


And no thread about Darwin would be complete without words from Dan Dennett..
A lecture from Stanford University in 2008:

YouTube - Dan Dennett on Darwin's legacy 1 0f 7

A clip from an interview where Dennett discusses the implications of Darwin's Dangerous Idea:

Daniel Dennett - Darwin's Dangerous Idea

Drafted for the college bio textbook Life by Purves et al, Dan Dennett on how Darwin changed the way we view our place in the universe:

How has Darwin’s theory of natural selection transformed our view of humanity’s place in the universe? -- Daniel Dennett

[Galapagos]

Woohoo! A happy belated Darwin Day to you all!

I've been pleasantly surprised by all the positive international Darwin coverage in the news. A quick perusal reveals articles about Darwin Day from around the world, including China, South Africa, Indonesia,
Trinidad, Taiwan, and India.
Of course, not everyone was so happy to honor Darwin on his big day, but I don't think they served as an effective buzz-kill at London's Natural History Museum yesterday, where visitors were able to enjoy Natural Selection brand beer:

Noah's flood can't drown the joy of Natural Selection beer - Short Sharp Science - New Scientist
Creationists staging a protest outside London's Natural History Museum yesterday couldn't spoil the party atmosphere as hundreds gathered to celebrate Darwin's 200th birthday - especially when there was specially brewed Natural Selection beer to help the mood.

The booze has been brewed by the aptly named Darwin Brewery who have also composed this limerick:

Charles Darwin was deep in reflection
On the fossils within his collection
When you sit down and think
You need a long drink -
Beer is the Natural Selection!

New Darwin stuff at both the journal Nature and Seed magazine.
Also, Richard Dawkins gave an interview on BBC about Darwin yesterday(as if we all haven't had enough already!), which was quite enjoyable(as usual!):
'BBC World Service Radio interview on Darwin' by Richard Dawkins - RichardDawkins.net

Carl Zimmer had a new article in Time magazine about Darwin yesterday. In the opening paragraph he makes note of the new Darwin movie, "Creation" that should be coming out this year, which has yet to be mentioned in this thread. Check out both the movie and Zimmer's article:

Evolving Darwin - TIME
What do Harry Potter, Sherlock Holmes, G.I. Joe and Charles Darwin have in common? They will all be coming to movie theaters this year. The only real person on that list will be played by Paul Bettany in the biopic Creation. And in true celebrity fashion, Darwin will be everywhere this year. In a convergence of anniversaries, Darwin would have turned 200 years old on Feb. 12, and his landmark book, On the Origin of Species, turns 150 on Nov. 24. There will be documentaries, lectures, conferences and museum exhibits. Darwin-themed blogs are being launched, and a cartload of Darwin-related books are being published. A replica of H.M.S. Beagle, the ship that carried Darwin around the world, will retrace his path. This January, Stanford University let a group of 90 people do likewise--albeit more comfortably, on a private Boeing 757.

[freeztar]

Have you heard of the "Academic Freedom Day"?

Some Americans disagree...

On 'Darwin Day,' many Americans beg to differ | csmonitor.com

[Galapagos]

Originally Posted by freeztar

Have you heard of the "Academic Freedom Day"?

Some Americans disagree...

On 'Darwin Day,' many Americans beg to differ | csmonitor.com

Those Americans are in good company with contributors of similar demographics in exemplars of progress like Turkey :

(acceptance of evolution by country, from Miller, et al[2006])
source



....
Also, I've posted this one elsewhere, but for the sake of posterity, here is a video of James D Watson and E O Wilson discussing Darwin with Charlie Rose:

YouTube - Charlie Rose - E.O. Wilson & James...

[Galapagos]

The journal Evolution: Education and outreach released a special Darwin issue with publications by T Ryan Gregory, Niles Eldredge, Eugenie Scott, and more:
Evolution: Education and Outreach - Volume 2, Number 1

The NCSE website has a good blog post with a summary of Darwin media coverage over the year:
The Darwin bicentennial in the news | NCSE

And I thought this was interesting, Ben Zimmer has a blog update on words first introduced to the English language by Darwin and Lincoln:
Happy Lincoln/Darwin Day! : Word Routes : Thinkmap Visual Thesaurus

Apparently, we have Darwin to thank for great words like "alfalfa" and "rodeo"