Darwin Day: 12 February

What Darwin Day is and where it came from

Darwin Day is an informal observance, not a government holiday. Universities, natural history museums, science societies and humanist groups use it for lectures, open days, debates and activities on evolution and on science in general. Its modern form began in California: Robert Stephens, a biologist, persuaded humanist groups at Stanford to hold an annual Darwin celebration, the first in 1995. Massimo Pigliucci, then at the University of Tennessee, started a separate Darwin Day there in 1997 (some accounts say 1996). Around 2000 the organisers set up a non-profit, now the International Darwin Day Foundation, to promote it worldwide.

Resolutions asking the United States Congress to recognise the day have been introduced several times; none has passed. In Britain the big moment was 2009, the double anniversary of Darwin's 200th birthday and the Origin's 150th, when the Natural History Museum, Cambridge and Down House all ran year-long programmes.

Darwin shares his birthday with Abraham Lincoln. Both were born on 12 February 1809, one in a doctor's house in Shrewsbury, the other in a log cabin in Kentucky. It makes an easy hook for a lesson about what 1809 led to.

Darwin's life in key dates

On the Origin of Species: what it said and why it took twenty years

The Origin made two claims. First, that species are not fixed: living things descend, with change, from common ancestors, so that all life forms one branching tree. Second, a mechanism: individuals vary, more are born than can survive, and those with variations that suit their conditions leave more offspring, so useful traits build up over many generations. Darwin called this natural selection, by analogy with the selective breeding of pigeons and dogs.

He had the idea by 1838 and wrote a long sketch in 1844, then waited. He wanted more evidence and feared the reaction, especially among religious friends and his devout wife Emma. In January 1844 he wrote to the botanist Joseph Hooker:

What forced his hand was a letter that arrived in June 1858 from Alfred Russel Wallace, collecting in the Malay Archipelago, who had reached the same idea on his own. Friends arranged for both men's papers to be read together, and Darwin wrote the Origin in about thirteen months as an “abstract” of his larger book. John Murray printed 1,250 copies, and booksellers ordered more than that on the first day.

The book ends with a sentence Darwin kept, with small changes, through six editions:

Darwin knew nothing of genes. The mechanism of inheritance came later, from Gregor Mendel's work (published 1866, rediscovered in 1900), and the two were joined in the 1930s and 1940s in what biologists call the modern synthesis.

Things to say carefully on Darwin Day

Darwin's views on religion changed over his life. He trained for the Church, lost his Christian faith gradually (the death of his daughter Annie in 1851 hit him hard), and in a letter of 7 May 1879 to John Fordyce wrote that he had never been an atheist in the sense of denying God, and that “agnostic” described his state of mind best. He avoided public fights over religion.

He hated slavery. His Beagle journal records his horror at what he saw in Brazil, and he quarrelled with Captain FitzRoy about it. Yet The Descent of Man uses the Victorian language of “civilised” and “savage” races, and later writers twisted ideas from evolution into eugenics, which Darwin did not create. A good Darwin Day session can hold both facts and let students read the sources themselves.

And he was not the lone genius of popular stories. He relied on a vast network of correspondents: about 15,000 of his letters survive, and the Darwin Correspondence Project at Cambridge has them online.

Darwin Day ideas for the classroom

• Beak buffet: give groups different “beaks” (tweezers, clothes pegs, spoons, chopsticks) and different “seeds” (rice, beans, marbles, rubber bands). Count what each beak collects in 30 seconds, then change the food supply and see which beak does best. Link it to the Galápagos finches, studied in the wild by Peter and Rosemary Grant since 1973.
• The “I think” page: show the 1837 Notebook B tree sketch and have students draw a family tree of five related animals with a common ancestor at the base.
• Earthworm watch: Darwin's last book (1881) was on earthworms. Set up a clear jar with layers of sand and soil, add worms and leaves, and record how fast the layers mix over two weeks.
• Read one letter: choose a letter from the Darwin Correspondence Project (the barnacle complaints to W. D. Fox in 1852 are short and funny) and ask what it shows about how science is really done.
• Interview Darwin: students prepare questions about the 1858 Wallace letter or the twenty-year delay. They can practise them by voice with an AI recreation of Charles Darwin on Yuga, built from his books and letters. It is not Darwin and can be wrong, so final work should cite the letters and the Origin.

Our questions to ask Charles Darwin list groups good questions by theme, and Victorian era key figures puts him beside his contemporaries.