"I called this principle, which states that any slight change found beneficial is preserved, natural selection." Charles Robert Darwin, Origin of Species
* "Let's celebrate the adventure in science, the passion for knowledge, which makes us wonder, explore and discover the nature of the world."
Darwin Day organizers
Charles Robert Darwin 1809-1882
Edna D'Boor, Chairwoman of the Department of Education and Public Affairs at SETI and Diane Richards, Marketing and Communications Officer at SETI
(Translation: Dikla Oren)
This Thursday, February 12, an international community of academics and humanists from eighteen countries across Africa, Asia, Europe, America and Oceania will celebrate Charles Darwin's 185th birthday. "Darwin Day", the brainchild of Robert Stephens and fellow humanist Arthur Jackson, was born in 1995. Since then, the two have seen how the celebration they initiated develops and becomes "an international celebration of science and humanities as well as an educational website that is active all year round."
The organizers of the day aim to increase awareness of him and "build excitement" around him in the short term until 2009, Darwin's bicentennial birthday. They hope that the bicentennial will be marked by a worldwide celebration of Darwin's legacy "and advance the understanding of science and the need for research in the global community." A quick look at this year's program of events reveals an extraordinary variety of ideas, related in one way or another to Darwin's ideas about change over time and natural selection. Among the lecture titles you can find "The Evolution of Evolution", "Planning Without Planning", "Forensic Astronomy" and "Warfare Patterns of the Mississippian Natives in America". The variety of topics is also great, starting with the proper care of animals in a zoo and ending with the variety that exists in the rain forests.
Darwin says in his autobiography "everything in nature is the result of fixed laws." The discovery of these laws, which govern the origin, nature and distribution of life, is at the forefront of the SETI Institute (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence). Also, the study of change over time is the overarching theme that unites all of our work, from laboratory work to classroom study. The research of our scientists, working in NASA's research team at the Astrobiology Institute, focuses on the co-evolution of life and its planet. The research includes projects such as the study of the formation of life at the beginning of the Earth and the study of the possibilities for life in planets, which surround relatively cool M-type stars. This project will have a direct impact on the institute's search for evidence of life, which, like us, is complex enough to wonder about its origin.
The evolution of complexity and intelligence is a challenging field of research, but one that can be tested scientifically. Research from the institute tries to extract important insights from the collection of fossils and the communication systems of animals. There is no doubt that Darwin was enthusiastic!
In preparing to write the article, we ran a search on a popular search engine to see how many websites we would get with "Charles Darwin". We received about 1.42 million sites. This is almost equal to Albert Einstein (1.56 million hits) and Aristotle (1.23 million hits) – but less than half of Britney Spears, whose name generated 3.3 million matches. From a scientific point of view, we know that the information we gathered in this simple exercise is of limited value. However, for experts in the field of education, who are well aware of the central role of science in our lives, these numbers are not a surprise.
Our faculty members in the Department of Education have marked next Thursday in their diaries. For us, those who have invested a considerable amount of time and effort into "Time Travel", our innovative and integrated science curriculum, based on the premise that "everything changes over time", Darwin's birthday is certainly a reason to celebrate and reflect on the progress of the human knowledge base. and on the role of man in its advancement.
We live in a very special time. We are the first generation with the scientific tools, necessary for exploring the world, that crossed the boundaries of the Earth's atmosphere. We look for evidence of the origin of life in hot spots on the ocean floor in the rocks and soil of Mars and in the interstellar material in our galaxy. We will also look for evidence of intelligence by looking for signals from a civilization broadcasting from distant planets.
To understand what we may discover, we must know ourselves well. Where did we come from? Where are we headed? What else is there in space and how did it develop? What will we become? These are big questions we should ponder on the birthday of the man who helped us reach them.
