My Darwin Valentine
by Molly Webb
How could I have missed it?! While Hallmark stores everywhere hawked their chocolate hearts for Valentine's day, Darwin Day on February 12th, a celebration of 'science and humanity', slipped by as stealthily as some junk DNA.
Of the hundreds of events from Cambridge to Kathmandu, I was sad to have missed the Phylum Feast in Ontario, Canada: "We celebrate Darwin's birthday with a potluck meal made up of as many kinds of organisms as possible, to remember our origin as omnivores and our relatedness to other lineages." I didn't find a vegetarian event for those highly-evolved human herbivores.
Also high on my list would have been the London Natural History Museum event which asked, "Have we moved beyond evolution? Or is major mutation and speciation still possible?"
At Demos, we've been interested in humans and nanoscience and technology for a while. (Did Darwin imagine human-engineered self-replication?) But we hold memes, not just genes, closest to our hearts.