It’s a big year for Charles Darwin

David Sapsted, Foreign Correspondent

• Last Updated: June 30. 2008 10:37PM UAE / June 30. 2008 6:37PM GMT

A statue of Charles Darwin outside his former school in Shrewsbury, UK. It is now 150 years since his theory was unveiled. istock

LONDON // A year of celebration, not to mention continuing controversy, gets under way today – the 150th anniversary of the public unveiling of a theory that was to change forever scientific and much religious thinking.

Not that Charles Darwin caused much of a ripple when he first presented his letters to a small group of scientists at a meeting of the Linnean Society at Burlington House on Piccadilly in London on July 1 1858.

Far from being hailed as “the most important idea to occur to a human mind” – as Richards Dawkins, a pre-eminent evolutionary biologist at Oxford University now describes it – Darwin’s talk to the Linnean Society left the boffins pretty unimpressed.

One professor present said of Darwin’s papers afterwards that “all that was new in them was false, and what was true was old”. It was to be another year – after Darwin published his theory on the origin of the species – that the significance of his work, and that of fellow scientist Alfred Wallace, began to sink in.

Darwin, who originally studied medicine at Edinburgh and then divinity at Cambridge, had struggled to formulate his theory ever since his epic, five-year voyage on HMS Beagle.

He had joined the five-year scientific expedition in 1831, a time when most European Jews and Christians simply accepted the Biblical story of God creating the world in seven days.

During the voyage, however, Darwin read a book on geology that suggested that fossils in rocks were evidence of animals that had lived many thousands or millions of years before.

As the voyage continued, Darwin experienced a rich variety of animal life and geological features.

In the Galapagos Islands, 800 kilometres west of South America, he had his eureka moment when he noticed that each of the islands supported its own form of finch, closely related to its neighbours but different in crucial ways.

For 20 years, Darwin worked on a theory of evolution brought about by natural selection, but it was only after he was contacted by Wallace, who had spent a decade roaming the world and collecting more than 100,000 specimens of plants and animals, that the two decided to go public.

Hence the start today of a series of seminars, meetings and exhibitions – some to coincide with the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth – to mark the lasting legacy of Darwin’s work.

The events will include a special exhibition at the Natural History Museum in London and worldwide student exchanges, with the celebrations culminating in Nov 2009, with a three-day conference in Egypt attended by the world’s most prominent naturalists.

Today’s opening event will be a much more humble affair: another meeting of the Linnean Society, which remains a primary repository of natural history expertise in Britain, to discuss how Darwin’s theory has developed in the past 150 years.

His theories are still rejected by some, notably creationists in the United States as well as many Muslims.

Even in Britain, a public-opinion poll two years ago found that only 48 per cent of respondents went along with Darwin’s evolutionary theories.

Writing in yesterday’s Guardian newspaper, Johnjoe McFadden, a professor of molecular genetics at the University of Surrey, said: “Quite simply, Darwin and Wallace destroyed the strongest evidence left in the 19th century for the existence of a deity.

“Ever since, biologists have used Darwin’s theory to make sense of the natural world. Contrary to the arguments of creationists [and intelligent design advocates] evolution is no longer just a theory. It is as much a fact as gravity or erosion. Scientists have measured evolutionary changes in scores of organisms.

“Of course, puzzles still remain. The origin of life itself remains a deep mystery. But perhaps the most hotly debated issue in evolutionary biology lies at the other end of the biological timescale, with the emergence of the human brain and its extraordinary capacity for abstract thought.”

A lot is still going on, it seems, as a result of Darwin’s decision to step aboard HMS Beagle and observe what was going on in the world around him.

dsapsted@thenational.ae