Welcome to the International Darwin Day Foundation website
Portrait By: G. Richmond
Darwin Day is a global celebration of science and reason held on or around Feb. 12, the birthday anniversary of evolutionary biologist Charles Darwin.
On this website you can find all sorts of information about Charles Darwin and the International Darwin Day Fundation. If you are hosting a Darwin Day event, you can post information about it on our events listing. You can also locate Darwin Day programs near you by searching our events section.
We have also provided resources for hosting Darwin Day events, including promotional support and a list of potential Darwin Day presenters.
Click here to read more about the history of the International Darwin Day Foundation.
Dr. Robert Stephens came up with the idea for Darwin Day in 1993 and co-founded the Darwin Day Program with Amanda Chesworth. Read his interview with Humanist Network News editor Maggie Ardiente on the early days of Darwin Day and his thoughts on the future of teaching evolution in the United States.
Darwin Day News
Celebrate Darwin Day this February 12 and help promote dialogue worldwide about Darwin’s legacy and influence on humanity.
A Special Video Message from the American Humanist Association
Recognizing Charles Darwin on his birthday, Feb. 12, is important to promote scientific inquiry.
Ten years ago, the MIT faculty made a bold decision to support global education by openly sharing their intellectual resources at no charge to anyone anywhere in the world. Over these ten years, OCW content has reached 100 million individuals and MIT has helped to spark an open education revolution that now includes hundreds of universities and organizations sharing courseware, text books and other digital learning resources.
The lecture presents an overview of evolutionary biology and its two major components, microevolution and macroevolution. The idea of evolution goes back before Darwin, although Darwin thought of natural selection. Evolution is driven by natural selection, the correlation between organism traits and reproductive success, as well as random drift. The history of life goes back approximately 3.7 billion years to a common ancestor, and is marked with key events that affect all life.
Genetic transmission is the mechanism that drives evolution. DNA encodes all the information necessary to make an organism. Every organism
Adaptive Evolution is driven by natural selection. Natural selection is not “survival of the fittest,” but rather “reproduction of the fittest.” Evolution can occur at many different speeds based on the strength of the selection driving it. These types of selection can result in directional, stabilizing, and disruptive outcomes. They can be driven by frequency-dependent selection and sexual selection, in addition to more standard types of selection.
Neutral evolution occurs when genes do not experience natural selection because they have no effect on reproductive success. Neutrality arises when mutations in an organism
Genetics controls evolution. There are four major genetic systems, which are combinations of sexual/asexual and haploid/diploid. In all genetic systems, adaptive genetic change tends to start out slow, accelerate in the middle, and occur slowly at the end. Asexual haploids can change the fastest, while sexual diploids usually change the slowest. Gene frequencies in large populations only change if the population undergoes selection.
Mutations are the origin of genetic diversity. Mutations introduce new traits, while selection eliminates most of the reproductively unsuccessful traits. Sexual recombination of alleles can also account for much of the genetic diversity in sexual species. In some instances, population size can affect diversity and rates of evolution and fixation, but in other cases population size does not matter.
Development is responsible for the complexity of multicellular organisms. It helps to map the genotype into the phenotype expressed by the organism. Development is responsible for ancient patterns among related organisms, and many structures important to development shared by many life forms have changed little over hundreds of millions of years. Development is expressed combinatorially, allowing a relatively small amount of genetic information to be expressed in many different ways.
Reaction norms depict the range of phenotypes a single genotype can produce, depending on the environment. Reaction norms must fit within an organism.
There are several explanations for the evolution of sex evolution and its continued prevalence. One is facilitating the spread of helpful mutations while hastening the removal of harmful ones. Another is expediting resistance against pathogens. Sex does have several costs compared to asex, such as only giving half your genome to offspring, having to find mates, and the risk of predation and STDs. Overall, the benefits outweigh the costs and sex has a firm hold on the majority of the recent branches of the tree of life.
