The University of Delaware will celebrate International Darwin Day 2018 with a lineup of seven scientists who will speak about a variety of issues related to evolution, on topics ranging from the earliest life on Earth to the future of biodiversity.

This year’s event, which is free and open to the public, will be from noon to 5 p.m., Monday, Feb. 12, in Room 215 of Harker Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering Laboratory on UD’s Newark campus.

The annual celebration is held on the birthday of Charles Darwin, who was born in 1809. An English naturalist, Darwin was the author of On the Origin of Species and the originator of the biological theory of evolution by natural selection.

UD’s Darwin Day event will feature a keynote address from noon to 1:30 p.m. by Jacquelyn Gill, assistant professor of paleo-ecology at the University of Maine, where she researches how ecosystems have changed over the last 2 million years. Her talk, “The Past Isn’t Dead: The Last 2 Million Years Can Help Biodiversity in the Next 100,” will examine extinction risk and the consequences of ice age extinctions and climate change for modern biodiversity.

The other speakers at the event, all from UD, and their topics are:

• Clara Chan, associate professor of geological sciences, “Were FE-Oxidizing Microbes the Earliest Life on Earth?”;
• John H. McDonald, associate professor of biological sciences, “Limits to DNA Sequence Variation in Species with Huge Population Sizes”;
• Salil Lachke, associate professor of biological sciences, “Keeping an Eye on Eye Evolution”;
• D. Heyward Brock, professor of English, “Darwin and Melville on the Galapagos”;
• Sarah Trembanis, associate professor of history in the Associate in Arts Program, “Eugenics and Adoption in 1950s Virginia: The Case of Georgia and David Rowe”; and
• Michael Moore, professor of biological sciences, “Evolutionary Cost of Healing.”

The celebration of Darwin Day continues Tuesday, Feb. 13, with “The Books on the Beagle,” a lecture from Leslie K. Overstreet, curator of natural history rare books, Smithsonian Libraries. The presentation will examine the remarkable library Charles Darwin and Capt. Fitzroy took with them on the famous round-the-world voyage of the HMS Beagle.

The event, which is free and open to the public, takes place at 4:30 p.m., Feb. 13, in the Class of 1941 Lecture Room at Morris Library.

Darwin Day at UD is sponsored by the College of Arts and Sciences, the Sigma Xi scientific research society, the Community Engagement Initiative, the departments of Anthropology and of Art and Design, the University of Delaware Library, Museums and Press, and the Interdisciplinary Science Learning Laboratories (ISLL).

For more about the Feb. 12 program and the speakers, visit the ISLL website.