Editor's Note: This post is also appearing at the American Institute for Biological Sciences' Year of Science 2009: Celebrate Evolution. For more, see our tribute to Darwin on his 200th birthday.

February 12th, as every aardvark to zebra knows by now, marked the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin.  The day before the bicentennial, a spirited discussion of Darwin and his place in history came up on, of all places, the Howard Stern radio program, on Sirius Satellite Radio.  The two-minute conversation is of interest because it represents an average view on Darwin from people who are well-educated but haven’t necessarily paid a great deal of attention to developments in evolutionary science.  For them, a distillation of Darwin comes down to a single salient fact: we came from monkeys. 

Editor's Note: This post is also appearing at the American Institute for Biological Sciences' Year of Science 2009: Celebrate Evolution. For more, see our tribute to Darwin on his 200th birthday.

February 12, 2009, marked the 200th birthday of two giants of the 19th century: Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln.  But the two great men are linked by something other than the simultaneity of their births.

Before we get to the details of that linkage, let me introduce a third larger-than-life character: Ernst Mayr.  In 2000, I had the unique privilege of working with one of the foremost evolutionary biologists of the 20th century, Ernst Mayr, on an essay he wrote for that year’s July issue of Scientific American, titled “Darwin’s Influence on Modern Thought.” 

If you can’t wait until tomorrow to celebrate Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday, just call someone in Darwin, Australia. That northern Australian city, nine and a half hours ahead of Greenwich Mean Time – near Darwin’s birthplace of Shrewsbury, England – has already begun celebrating the 200th birthday of its namesake.

It’s a bit unclear when Darwin – population 120,900 – got its name. Here’s the story, as best we can tell: The first Westerners who paid a visit to the area, which was and still is home to the Aboriginal group the Larrakia, were the Dutch in the 1660s. They were busy mapping the coast and didn't bestow the spot with a name.  

Fast-forward to 1836. Darwin returns from his journey around the world, which included stops along the southern side of Australia on the HMS Beagle. The next year, the Beagle set out on a surveying expedition with the same captain, John Clements Wickham, and admiral, John Lort Stokes. In September 1839, they spotted the harbor, which Wickham and Stokes decided to dub Darwin Harbor in honor of their former traveling companion.

Editor's Note: This post is also appearing at the American Institute for Biological Sciences' Year of Science 2009: Celebrate Evolution. For more on Darwin's 200th birthday, see our January 2009 issue on evolution.

"If I were to give an award for the single best idea anyone ever had, I'd give it to Darwin." So wrote philosopher Daniel Dennett in his 1995 book Darwin's Dangerous Idea. "In a single stroke, the idea of evolution by natural selection unifies the realm of life, meaning and purpose with the realm of space and time, cause and effect, mechanism and physical law."