Darwin Day

This year - 200 Years Old!

2009 is an especially important year for fans of Charles Darwin, as we celebrate both the bicentenary of Darwin's birth (12th Februrary) and the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species.  The BHA is a partner of the Darwin 200 initiative and we are running numerous events in celebration of the bicentennial

Join the Facebook Group 1,000,000 for 24th November!

Darwin Day - every year

Darwin Day is 12 February every year.  The BHA holds an annual Darwin Day Lecture and supports other events.

We run a campaign to have Darwin Day recognised as a public holiday.  See our dedicated Darwin Day Campaign page for more information.

Charles Darwin was not only a great scientific thinker.  He was fascinated by the relationship between human beings and other animals.  He foresaw the false ideological evils for which natural selection might be used in justification and warned against such misunderstanding.  He was also sensitive to the private and social upheaval that the theory of evolution would cause: revealing that human beings all belong to one common family and relating us to all other living things came at the cost of displacing humanity from the central, divine position we had previously occupied.  Despite his personal caution, Darwinism radically re-shaped our intuitions about all living things, and today humanists all over the world can celebrate a defining moment in the naturalisation of our understanding of the world.