Darwin Day

What the day is

Darwin Day is observed on February 12, the birthday of Charles Darwin, born in Shrewsbury in 1809 on the same day as Abraham Lincoln.

Origin and background

The finches are the part everyone knows and the part that is largely wrong. Darwin did not recognize their significance during the Beagle voyage, failed to label many specimens by island, and had to reconstruct the provenance afterward from other people's collections. The identification of them as closely related species that had diverged was made by the ornithologist John Gould back in London. They appear barely at all in On the Origin of Species. The story of a sudden Galápagos insight is a later simplification.

What he actually did was slower and more convincing. He spent eight years dissecting barnacles. He bred pigeons, corresponded with animal breeders and gardeners across the world, and studied how deliberate selection reshaped domestic species within human lifetimes, then argued that a natural version of the same process, given enough time, would do more. Domestic breeding, not exotic islands, is the evidentiary backbone of the book.

He also delayed roughly twenty years before publishing, and only moved when Alfred Russel Wallace sent him a manuscript from the Malay Archipelago outlining essentially the same mechanism. Their work was presented jointly in 1858, and the Origin appeared the following year.

The central idea is simpler than its reputation. Organisms vary, more are born than survive, some variations improve the odds of surviving and reproducing, and those variations become more common. Nothing in it requires foresight or purpose, which is precisely what made it difficult to accept.

How to take part

• Read the Origin's opening chapter, which is about pigeon breeding and is very readable.
• Look up Wallace, who reached the same idea independently and is mostly forgotten.
• Notice selection at work in dog breeds, which is the argument Darwin used.
• Visit a natural history museum collection, which is what his evidence looked like.
• Stop crediting the finches, or at least credit Gould alongside them.