For the John Templeton Foundation, I wrote about educators adding evolutionary studies to their curricula.
Every year scientists and science enthusiasts around the world celebrate February 12 as International Darwin Day with lectures and events. This year there will be hundreds of observances to mark what would have been Darwin’s 221st birthday, ranging from a weeklong Darwin Festival at Salem State University in Oregon to a lecture on “Darwin and Evolution in Russian poetry” in Novosibirsk. Darwin still matters immensely today, both as a cultural touchstone and as a titan of science. His theory of natural selection is the foundation of modern biology, and numerous new fields — most prominently genetics and genomics — have flourished under his theories. Darwin also made a number of additional conjectures about the nature of evolution that remained unproven in his lifetime, and have not been addressed head-on until much more recently.
In 2017, Kevin Laland, a professor of behavioral and evolutionary biology at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, published Darwin’s Unfinished Symphony, a book that looked at culture as not only a product of evolutionary processes but also a driver of them. “Unlike the unfinished compositions of Beethoven or Schubert, which had to be assembled into popular masterpieces using solely those fragmentary sketches left by the original composers, Darwin’s intellectual descendants have taken up the challenge of completing his work,” Laland wrote. “However, it is only in the last few years that a truly compelling account has begun to crystallize.”