Darwin Day is an international celebration of science and humanity as exemplified in the life, work and influence of Charles Darwin. Darwin Day seeks to promote a better understanding of science, the scientific method, and evolutionary biology, in particular. Darwin Day is celebrated on or around February 12, Charles Darwin's birthday.
Darwin's On the Origin of Species documented the evidence available in 1859 that demonstrated that evolution was a scientific fact and offered a plausible mechanism by which it operated: natural selection. For Darwin, natural selection acted to create adaptations. Darwin wrote:
"Slow though the process of selection may be, if feeble man can do much by his powers of artificial selection, I can see no limit to the amount of change, to the beauty and infinite complexity of the coadaptations between all organic beings, one with another and with their physical conditions of life, which may be effected in the long course of time by nature's power of selection."
Vast amounts of time and natural selection yield "infinite complexity." Darwinian natural selection is still the mechanism we use to explain organismal adaptation, but the intervening 148 years since the publication of the Origin have led to many new discoveries that help us document the precise molecular events that underlie those adaptations. Chief among these is the sequence of an organism's DNA, which tells not only how to build the organism, but also contains its evolutionary history as well.
This year's speaker, Dr. Sean Carroll, will discuss examples as diverse as Antarctic ice fish and rock pocket mice that help us understand the link between mutations and adaptations, and help us see the fingerprints of natural selection in the genes of every living thing.