12 February 2006

Darwin Day

Today is the 197th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin. In honor of this, I've tried to pull together a mini-blog carnival of posts related to Darwin and evolution.

The Darwin Day website has a list of events from around the world that were (or are being) held today in celebration of Darwin's birthday. Scanning the list, it looks like most of these are scientific lectures about evolution and evolutionary biology.

Scientists aren't the only ones who are giving talks and making presentations today. Today is being marked as Evolution Sunday in hundreds of churches across the United States. This event was put together by a the same person who started the Clergy Letter Project, which has collected over 10,000 signatures of clergy who support teaching real science in the science classroom. For those interested, their website has a list of links to some of the sermons.

Darwin's birthday and evolution have gotten some attention from bloggers recently, too. PZ has a picture and an excerpt from a biography of Darwin. Actually, pictures seem to be a real theme for today. There are a couple of other photographs on blogs, Olduvai George has a nice portrait of a young Darwin, and Jennifer Forman Orth gives us an iconic image of Darwin in an unlikely place.

There are also several blog posts that have gone up in recent days that fit this occasion well. Tara Smith, over at Aetiology, was kind enough to write a post about how evolution relates to her own research. 10,000 Birds wrote a post earlier this week that presents a nice discussion of evolution and birds. Over at Daily Kos, there's a brief history of the evolution of humans since the big bang. Alun touches on the evolution of religion in a post, and there's an article on evolution written by Niles Eldredge over at The Virginia Quarterly Review. Finally, I wrote a small piece about how we get new species the other day that seems to fit the occasion.

Happy Birthday, Charles.

5 comments:

Danny Boy, FCD said...

Alas, they prefer to use images of Chuck as an old man. Granted that is the face recognizable to most people, but after having read Charles Darwin's 5 year romp through South America and the Pacific, he will always be a bright young naturalist in my mind. Olduvai George also used a younger image of Chuck.

Josh Rosenau said...

Thoughts from Kansas has a review of the Darwin exhibit at the AMNH and a tribute to Darwin and Lincoln.

Enjoy.

Ed Fitzgerald said...

I had hoped to take in the Darwin exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History, but a bit of snow here in NYC prevented that.

I did manage to put up another post reminding folks about Darwin Day, however, including some quotes from the man himself.

Bora Zivkovic said...

I prefered to use the picture of him as a young man, too.

Are you still interested in posts about the way evolution affects out research?

Anonymous said...

Don't forget this great tribute...

Their Own version of a Big Bang

Scary...