February 12, 2009 is Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday, and the whole of the February is “Celebrate Evolution Month,” of the 2009 Year of Science.

Darwin: Charles Darwin
Courtesy Wikimedia CommonsIn 1831, Darwin embarked on a 5-year voyage around the world, on the ship the HMS Beagle. The Beagle’s mission was to survey coastlines, but Darwin spent his time studying the fossils, as well as living plants and animals, of the lands the Beagle visited.

Darwin began to notice the small similarities between different species of living organisms, and the features they share with the fossils of extinct creatures. Darwin added his own thoughts and observations to the ideas of other scientists to form the basis of modern evolutionary theory: that one species, slowly changing from generation to generation, can give rise to another species.

While some of the details of Darwin’s theories have been modified over the years, his ideas still created the foundation of our understanding of biology. So this February let’s all give it up for the man with the Beagle! Yeah!

This sketch from Charles Darwin’s notebook is the very first evolutionary tree. As simple as it looks, the idea that one species could eventually split from another was a revolutionary and controversial notion.