Happy Origin of Species Day! (November 24)

Tomorrow, November 24, 2012, marks the 153rd anniversary of a day that quietly changed all of science, should have changed much of theology, and brought much of the world into the future, though many people don’t know it yet.

It’s a Saturday this year — so let’s be a day early, to get informed and involved the people who don’t check their calendars on the weekends.

On November 24, 1859, Charles Darwin’s book was published, On the Origin of Species.

Title page, 1859 edition of Darwin’s Origin of Species – image from the University of Sydney via Wikimedia image

How to celebrate?  You could read a summary of Ernst Mayr’s shorthand version of Darwin’s theory, and understand it really for the first time  (I hope not the first time, but there are a lot of people who really don’t understand what Darwin said — especially among critics of evolution):

Darwin’s theory of evolution is based on key facts and the inferences drawn from them, which biologist Ernst Mayr summarised as follows:^[3]

• Every species is fertile enough that if all offspring survived to reproduce the population would grow (fact).
• Despite periodic fluctuations, populations remain roughly the same size (fact).
• Resources such as food are limited and are relatively stable over time (fact).
• A struggle for survival ensues (inference).
• Individuals in a population vary significantly from one another (fact).
• Much of this variation is inheritable (fact).
• Individuals less suited to the environment are less likely to survive and less likely to reproduce; individuals more suited to the environment are more likely to survive and more likely to reproduce and leave their inheritable traits to future generations, which produces the process of natural selection (inference).
• This slowly effected process results in populations changing to adapt to their environments, and ultimately, these variations accumulate over time to form new species (inference).

Charles Darwin’s 1837 sketch, his first diagram of an evolutionary tree from his First Notebook on Transmutation of Species (1837) on view at the the Museum of Natural History in Manhattan. Interpretation of handwriting: “I think case must be that one generation should have as many living as now. To do this and to have as many species in same genus (as is) requires extinction . Thus between A + B the immense gap of relation. C + B the finest gradation. B+D rather greater distinction. Thus genera would be formed. Bearing relation” (next page begins) “to ancient types with several extinct forms.”  Wikimedia image

This is mostly an encore post — hey, it’s a history blog — with tips of the old scrub brush justified to Larry Moran and P. Z. Myers, and especially Eugenie Scott and the National Center for Science Education.

More:

• The Origin of Darwinism: Charles Darwin and The Origin of Species ebook (guardian.co.uk)
• World’s youngest species (bbc.co.uk)
• Charles Darwin’s insurance documents found by RSA (telegraph.co.uk)
• Was Charles Darwin the world’s most emo scientist? (mnn.com)
• Visualizing Origin of the Species (ritholtz.com)
• Now that’s a tee-shirt! (whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com)
• A history of the theory of evolution through natural selection (guardian.co.uk)
• Charles Darwin gets 4,000 write-in votes in Georgia election (mnn.com)
• Creationism and Vitalism (sensuouscurmudgeon.wordpress.com)
• Carl Zimmer wins Kavli Science Journalism Award
• From NCSE:
• NCSE offers a free preview in .pdf of Rudolf A. Raff’s Once We All Had Gills (Indiana University Press, 2012)
• NCSE’s Joshua Rosenau’s invited essay “Science Denial: A Guide for Scientists” was published in Trends in Microbiology 2012;20(12):567-569.