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.

The official celebration website (darwinday.org) lists 281 events in 31 nations, including more than 170 in the USA. Events range from "Evolutionpalooza!" at the San Francisco Main Branch Public Library to an all-day reading of Darwin's On the Origin of Species (its 150th anniversary year) at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wis.

"Darwin was it," says paleontologist Robert Carroll of McGill University in Montreal, who is giving a public talk at the university's Redpath Museum.

Modern biology begins with Darwin, who died in 1882 at 73, and his recognition that every living species evolved from a shared single-cell ancestor formed in Earth's earliest days, Carroll says. "Particularly because of the anti-evolution reactions going on despite the science, we have to celebrate this anniversary."

So, part birthday bash, part thumb-in-the-eye to creationists, part opportunity for publishers rolling out Darwin books like sausages — who and what are evolution's fans celebrating?

"Certainly without Darwin, we would have had (discoveries about) evolution, but we wouldn't have had natural selection," says science historian Peter Bowler of Queen's University Belfast in Northern Ireland.

Darwin proposed in 1859 that natural selection — "preservation of favorable individual differences and variations, and the destruction of those which are injurious," in his words — was the inherited mechanism of evolution, how living things endured by hanging onto the traits that helped them survive and eventually losing those that didn't.

Upending the widespread belief among biologists that all species arose separately, Darwin's central argument in his landmark 1859 book On the Origin of Species was this: "It inevitably follows, that as new species in the course of time are formed through natural selection, others will become rarer and rarer, and finally extinct."