(Feb. 16, 2009) To celebrate the 200th birthday of legendary naturalist Charles Darwin, the University of Colorado Denver in conjunction with Metropolitan State College of Denver hosted a series of events around Darwin’s teachings, research and his book, On the Origin of Species, Thursday, Feb. 12.

Faculty from UC Denver’s Downtown Campus and Anschutz Medical Campus together with faculty from Metropolitan State College of Denver covered an array of topics impacted by Darwin’s work.

In addition, two lectures took place at the Anschutz Medical Campus Library. The final lecture, delivered by Bruce Paton, PhD, professor emeritus at UC Denver, addressed the wide range of health afflictions that burdened Darwin for more than 40 years of his life. In “Charles Darwin: World’s Most Productive Invalid,” Paton discussed the numerous symptoms that limited Darwin as well as the varying hypotheses about the causes of these maladies.

Following Paton’s lively, in-depth examination of Darwin’s health, Emily Epstein (a cataloguing librarian in the Collection Management department in UC Denver’s Health Science Library) shared two very remarkable books with the standing-room only audience. One was a first edition copy of the book Darwin co-wrote with Alfred Russel Wallace for the Linnean in 1858. Second was one of the only 1,250 printed first editions of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, which had published exactly 150 years ago (see above). Lecture attendees had the opportunity to hold and look through these two rare books. Lilian Hoffecker, a reference and education librarian who helped organize the Darwin lecture series, commented, “The books were a major reason [to have the event]…Plus, it is his 200^th birthday which seems to be getting more media attention than Lincoln’s, whose 200^th birthday is the same exact day.”

Speakers at the Downtown Campus event conducted 30-minute lectures on the following topics:

• the evolution of cancer
• why Darwin was English
• ant social systems
• Darwin’s legacy
• genetics of speciation
• human evolution
• evolutionary genetics
• human genome evolution
• and bird-pine co-evolution

Photo: Left to right, downtown participants included Jack Omstead (student, MSCD), Hayley Jaqua (student, MSCD), Dan Howard (dean, CLAS), Diana Tomback (professor, Biology), Michael Greene (assistant professor, Biology), Catherine Gaither (assistant professor, Anthropology, MSCD), James Sikela, professor, Pharmacology, James DeGregori, professor, Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics), David Pollack , associate professor, Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics, and Gabriel Finkelstein (associate professor, History).