Although no one has actually seen Charles Darwin, and some might describe his existence as only a theory, the founder of evolution was the guest of honor at a 200th birthday celebration.
A birthday party must have a cake, and Madison Chocolates provided a suitable chocolate one with layers, or strata, decorated with an elaborate frosting tree of life, some chocolate ammonites, the HMS Beagle, and three hominid skeletons.
About 80 people packed into the Peabody Museum’s hall of minerals for Thursday night’s party. They sipped non-alcoholic drinks, played a Darwin trivia game, ate a sliver of cake and paid their respects to Darwin — a brilliant naturalist who explained speciation through natural selection, revolutionizing biology.
It was one of a series of well-attended events in town this week in Darwin’s honor.
Certain quarters of the U.S. continue to profess a belief in “intelligent design,” the unprovable idea that Earth and life were created by an immaterial intelligent designer.
Virtually all scientists now accept that Earth is about 4.5 billion years old, and that life
evolved gradually from simple organisms to humans, and all other animals and plants.
If anyone believed otherwise they kept it to themselves Thursday, as museum staff, students, and visitors hoisted plastic cups of sparkling cider, and sang “happy birthday” to the cake and a cardboard Darwin cutout.
Derek Briggs, professor and director of the Peabody Museum, said the celebration was “a very nice way of articulating the importance of evolution, in a gentle way.”
Nathan Eutrup, of Yale, said Darwin’s birthday would be a big deal, “Even if some people don’t understand how a theory works. This would be a huge celebration even without ‘intelligent design,’” he said.
Darwin had epistolary links to Yale through Othniel Charles Marsh, Yale’s famed dinosaur hunter, collector and classifier.
Briggs read a letter from an elderly Darwin to Marsh, thanking the Yale paleontologist for a monograph about fossils of toothed birds, evidence that bolstered evolution.
“Your work on old birds is the best support for evolution for the past 20 years,” Darwin wrote through his wife, and cousin, Emma.
“Emma” was the answer to one of the questions in the Darwin trivia game.
Where was he born? Shrewsbury, on Feb. 12, 1809. He died in 1882. (He shares a birthday with Abraham Lincoln.)
The name of the ship he used was the HMS Beagle, and his bulldog’s name was Huxley.
Darwin was born into interesting times, including the discovery of the gorilla, said Robert McCracken Peck (pictured), senior fellow and librarian of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia.
Paul Belloni Du Chaillu, a French American explorer, was the first Westerner to confirm the existence of gorillas. At first the dimunitve Du Chaillu was doubted and declared a fraud, but in 1855 he returned to the west coast of Africa and sent hundreds of specimens, including gorillas, to National Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia.
He returned to the U.S. in 1859, and the interest he sparked in human-like primates prompted Darwin to publish his seminal work.
In November Darwin’s controversial “The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection: Or, the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life” was issued.
The extensive hubbub surrounding Du Chaillu and his gorillas evolved into Edgar Rice Burrough’s “Tarzan,” and eventually “King Kong.”
Only comparatively recently did researchers discover that gorillas live almost exclusively on plants, and are not the terrifying, violent beasts portrayed by Du Chaillu and Victorian artists and sculptors, Peck said.‚Ä®
Everybody remembers King Kong, but Paul Belloni Du Chaillu is hardly a household name.