Scientists gather to celebrate evolutionary biology

What historical figure can be found on money, is taught about in schools all over and celebrates his birthday Feb. 12?

Though Abraham Lincoln might come to mind first, he shares a birthday with Charles Darwin, author of “The Origin of Species” and founder of the theory of natural selection.

Born Feb. 12, 1809, Charles Darwin is celebrated for his achievements through an event called Darwin Day.

“It’s a recognition of Darwin’s contributions, celebrated on his birthday and around the world,” said Edmund Brodie, professor and executive director of program development of the college of science. “Biologists get together, have a party, talk about Darwin, talk about evolution, so on.”

The reason behind it, Brodie said, is because of Darwin’s discovery of the theory of natural selection, which is considered the unifying principle of all life sciences by explaining the reason for the diversity of life.

Biology graduate student, Shab Mohammadi, feels that part of the celebration of Darwin Day is about his intellectual bravery in publishing his findings.

“He’s kind of a hero, honestly, to a lot of biologists,” she said. “I mean at that time, what he discovered was completely against the religious beliefs of his time and coming out publicly with that, he got a lot of backlash. He was mocked and nobody believed him except for maybe his close colleagues.”

In 1959, Darwin published the first edition of his “Origin of Species,” which had two main purposes, said Frank Messina, a professor in the department of biology.

The first was to confirm the theory of evolution through overwhelming evidence.

“He compiled all this evidence, this massive amount of evidence from different areas of science that all forced everyone, everyone in science to read his book and look at all this evidence for evolution,” Messina said, “and it was so convincing that by the time he wrote his sixth edition in 1872, there were almost no professional biologists who doubted that life had evolved on earth.”

The second purpose of “The Origin of the Species,” Messina said, was to introduce natural selection as the driving force for the evolutionary changes that make species better adapted to their environment.

This theory wasn’t as easily accepted as evolution, however.

“It pretty much took until the people started understanding genetics before they understood how natural selection works,” Messina said.

Charles Darwin began to develop this idea during his voyage on the HMS Beagle, which was on an expedition to chart the coastline of South America. As a naturalist, Darwin made observations on geology and collected specimens to send back to England.

It was on the Galapagos Island where Darwin began to formulate the idea of adaptive evolution as he saw differences in the characteristics of birds and tortoises among the different islands. He speculated that these slight differences meant that they shared a common ancestor and had evolved to better survive their environment.

This idea was different than the popular belief at the time, proposed by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, which was that each organism evolved independently into higher, more complex forms.

“‘The Origin of Species,’ the book, was published in 1859, and that really was the starting point of people studying evolution by natural selection,” Brodie said, “and we still study natural selection and how it affects different populations.”

Depending on the college or group, Darwin Day is celebrated through small social gatherings to big public symposiums with guest speakers in the field of evolutionary biology. Some areas don’t even do anything other than mention it through Facebook, said Mohammadi.

“It’s not like Easter or Halloween,” she said. “It’s not something that’s nationwide. It’s not as big of a deal as other holidays are. It’s just kind of an acknowledgment holiday because he’s a cool guy. He deserves some acknowledgment.”

In addition to acknowledging Darwin’s achievements and bravery, Mohammadi said celebrating Darwin Day is also a way to remember the importance of reporting discoveries despite obstacles in the way.

“It doesn’t matter what the discovery is,” Mohammadi said, “A discovery is a discovery.”

— lormialor@gmail.com