A belated happy Darwin Day!

I celebrated last Tuesday as Paczki Day, but it was also Charles Darwin's birthday, something I celebrated last year.  In the interest of completeness, here is my post for this year.

Scientific American: Darwin Day: A personal offering
By Ashutosh Jogalekar
February 12, 2013

Two hundred and four years ago this day, Charles Darwin was born. The vision of life that he created and expounded on transformed humanity’s perception of its place in the universe. After Copernicus’s great heliocentric discovery, it was Darwin’s exposition of evolution and natural selection that usurped human beings from their favored place at the center of the universe. But far from trivializing them, it taught them about the vastness and value of life, underscored the great web of interactions that they are a part of, and reinforced their place as both actor and spectator in the grand game of the cosmos. Not only as a guiding scientific principle but as an all-encompassing element of understanding our place in the world, evolution through natural selection has become the dominant idea of our time. As the eminent biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky put it quite simply, nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution. Evolution is a fact. Natural selection is a theory that is now as good as a fact. Both evolution and natural selection happen. And both of them owe their exalted place in our consciousness to a quiet, gentle and brilliant Englishman.

Today it is gratifying and redeeming to know how right Darwin was and how much his theory has been built upon, and frustrating to keep on realizing how those professing religious certainty threaten to undermine the value of his and others’ careful and patient discoveries. Especially in the United States evolution has become a bizarre battleground of extreme opinions and mudslinging, a development that seems to be in step with the tradition of coloring any and every issue with a political hue. In this country, it seems today that you can hardly utter an opinion without attaching a label to it. You cannot simply have an opinion or take a position, no matter how grounded in fact it is; your position has to be Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, Neo-Conservative, Socialist or Atheist. if none of these, it has to be Centrist then.

Yes, Darwin has been terribly politicized.

Darwin wasn't just a biologist, and neither am I.  We both started off as geologists.

Scientific American: Darwin: Geologist First and Last
By Dana Hunter
February 10, 2013

Shall we play a word-association game? I’ll say “Darwin.” And chances are, you’ll say “Origin of Species,” or “Evolution,” or “Biology.” Charles Darwin laid the foundation for modern biology. He changed our whole conception of how species come to be, why a single simple organism could be the root of a riotously-branching tree, how “from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.” Of course we associate him with biology. Rightly so.

But I have got a different word associated with him now: “Geology.”

Darwin was one hell of a biologist. But he began and finished with geology, and geology is at the heart of The Origin.

The article then goes on to describe the effect of Darwin's reading of Lyell's "Principles of Geology," a story I tell my geology students every semester.

Once again, happy Darwin Day, a little late!