Celebrating Charles Darwin Day

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Tattoo inspired from Darwin’s notebook around July 1837 that showed his first sketch of an evolutionary tree.

Today people around the world celebrates the 204 Anniversary of Charles Darwin birth.  To me this day is special and I celebrate the life and work of this great man by sharing with you the WHY he is history’s most important thinker.

Throughout his life, Darwin’s work resulted in the most enormous benefits that scientific knowledge, acquired through human curiosity and ingenuity, ever contributed to the advancement of humanity.  Darwin gave us the research and opened the doors for human inquiry by founding the unifying theory of Biology: Evolution. He was the first to present convincing evidence of it and its major driving force – natural selection.

The general idea of evolution preceded Darwin, and he shied away from making the explicit and incendiary claim that even humans were evolved from other creatures. But his explanation of natural selection as a mechanism that made evolution plausibly able to explain the origin of species without reference to a creator up-ended the contemporary orthodoxy. It set a new course that no subsequent scientific work could ignore. And according to the eminent late evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr, “Eliminating God from science made room for strictly scientific explanations of all natural phenomena; it gave rise to positivism; it produced a powerful intellectual and spiritual revolution, the effects of which have lasted to this day.”

Eugene Byrne and Simon Gurr wanted to celebrate Darwin’s lifelong spirit of curiosity and bring the message to kids with their new graphic novel.

Darwin Day. February 12, 2012.

Darwin Day is a global celebration of science and reason held on or around Feb. 12, the birthday anniversary of evolutionary biologist Charles Darwin and the anniversary of the publication of “On the Origin of Species”.

I invite you to watch this video with a musical celebration of the wonders of biology, including evolution, natural selection, DNA, and more. Featuring David Attenborough, Richard Dawkins and Bill Nye. “The Greatest Show on Earth” is the 13th video in the Symphony of Science music videos series. All of which are now studied because of the questions that Charles Darwin dare to ask.

Symphony of Science – The Greatest Show on Earth! A music video about Evolution

On Consumerism, Sex, Advertising, and Human Nature

Peacock (Pavo cristatus), displaying his tail,...

“The Ferrari is exactly the same in the human context,” says evolutionary psychologistGad Saad, “as the peacock‘s tail is on the peacock.”

Saad is an evolutionary behavioral scientist at Concordia University and author of the book The Consuming Instinct: What Juicy Burgers, Ferraris, Pornography, and Gift Giving Reveal about Human Nature, in which he argues that most consumer behavior can be explained by evolutionary psychology.  Watch his interview,

Reason.tv‘s Zach Weissmueller sat down with Saad to discuss why most Ferrari owners are men, whether or not advertising executives manipulate our minds, the strong political opposition to the evolutionary sciences from across the spectrum, and the evolutionary significance of Sir Mix-a-lot‘s “Baby Got Back.”

About 10 minutes. Interview by Zach Weissmueller. Shot by Sharif Matar; edited by Weissmueller.

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