Darwin Day is February 12^th and, depending on how you count the anniversary, it could be the 20^th anniversary today.* I know some scientists are a bit wary of a day about science, which should be about testing ideas regardless of authority, being based around one man. What you have to bear in mind is that when these events were started historical conditions were quite different.

Back in 1997, scientists were worried that a right-wing movement was trying to sideline scientific evidence to promote their own dogma. Hard as it is to believe, there were politicians in the US who openly promoted a primitive form of creationism over the evidence. Others were essentially fabricating their own ‘facts’ in order to argue for a wacky ‘intelligent design’ hypothesis. Darwin’s character was slandered in order to attempt to discredit evolution – which makes as much sense as thinking if we could discount Newton as a Satanist, then we could magically float everywhere because gravity wouldn’t matter anymore.

Scientists concentrated on the evidence but didn’t have much success. The problem was that this wasn’t an argument about the science of Natural Selection, but the politics. This might seem odd to scientists, but authoritarians appreciated that Natural Selection was a serious threat. Mark Steel explains it in his programme on Darwin.