Feb. 7, 2008

Feb. 12 is "Darwin Day" -- Students Celebrate B'day of Evolution Champ

ALBANY, N.Y. – This Feb. 12 is the 199th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth.

Hundreds of student and community groups around the world will celebrate the date as "Darwin Day" in honor of the discoveries and life of the man who famously described biological evolution via natural selection.

The Secular Student Alliance, an international student organization, encourages its 112 campus affiliate groups to celebrate Darwin Day.

"Darwin Day uses the life and work of Charles Darwin as a spring board to celebrate the many ways that science makes our lives better.” said August E. Brunsman IV, executive director of the Secular Student Alliance. “We should celebrate science just like family, love, nature, civil rights and the many other things we already celebrate."

Darwin Day festivities can include lectures, debates, essay contests, museum exhibits, art shows and even an "Evolution Banquet" with "Primordial Soup" followed by a "Darwin Fish Fry." Brunsman said many college groups like to have birthday cake and have lectures by biology professors from their campus community or show "Inherit the Wind," the 1960 film inspired by the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial.

The theory of evolution was controversial in Darwin's time and remains controversial in the United States today.

Recent Gallup polls show that 43 percent of Americans reject the theory of evolution and instead believe that "God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so." And at least four 2008 presidential candidates have said they do not believe the theory of evolution.

"There is a continuous threat to evolutionary biology and to science in general that has been posed by fundamentalists who reject entirely a Darwinian worldview because they feel it threatens their religious beliefs," said Massimo Pigliucci, Ph.D., a professor of evolutionary biology at the State University of New York-Stony Brook.

Prof. Pigliucci uses Darwin Day to teach the public about how science works "so people aren't just hearing about science from their local preacher."

“We may not be able to get everyone to accept the reality of evolution,” said Michael Amini, an officer of Secular Student Union at the University of Washington. “But we just may be able to help people realize what exactly it is they are rejecting. It would be an outstanding success to move the question of the origin of species out of the taboo and into public discourse.”

The Darwin Day Celebration is a project of the Albany, N.Y.-based Institute for Humanist Studies, an international educational nonprofit that promotes reason and humanity. The Secular Student Alliance is headquartered at the Institute for Humanist Studies in Albany, N.Y., and has staff in New York City and California. Prof. Pigliucci’s free, online course, "Evolution, Creationism and the Nature of Science," is offered though the Institute for Humanist Studies at http://HumanistEducation.com.

Next year will mark both the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth and the 150th anniversary of the 1859 publication of Darwin's "The Origin of Species", which presented the scientific theory that populations evolve over generations through natural selection.

The Darwin Day Celebration started with one event at Stanford University in 1995. Last year there were more than 850 Darwin Day events world-wide.

This year, hundreds of church congregations will celebrate Darwin Day by hosting an "Evolution Weekend" to explore the compatibility of science and religion.

For information, visit:

www.DarwinDay.org
www.SecularStudents.org
www.HumanistStudies.org

###