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HAPPY BIRTHDAY DARWIN

The father of modern evolutionary history turns 200 today. Robert Butler offers a natural selection of the honours and tributes now flowing his way, and sheds light on the fittest ...

Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE

A few years ago, a BBC TV series, "Great Britons", encouraged the British public to vote for the number-one Brit of all time. Winston Churchill beat out the engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel, and Lady Di, Princess of Wales, came in third place. It was a blow for supporters of Charles Darwin, who came fourth.

Any sense of injustice will have been soothed by the tributes flowing Darwin's way on the 200th anniversary of his birth. (Born on February 12th 1809, he shares his birthday with Abraham Lincoln.) The outpouring of Darwin exhibitions and Darwin books, Darwin television and Darwin radio programmes, Darwin talks and Darwin memorabilia offers a fine alternative to the forlorn sepia image of the Victorian patriarch, with his heavy brow and cascading beard, that appears on the back of the £10 note.

You could raise a glass to Darwin at the pub, the Bull and the Barne, a couple hundred yards from the house in Shrewsbury where the man himself was born and raised. The pub is now serving Darwin's Origin, a new bottled beer (£1.89) from the Shrewsbury-based Salopian Brewery, which classifies it as a "copper coloured beer that evolves with a pronounced hop character which is balanced by a refined malt finish."

Or you could celebrate his birthday at his student rooms at Christ's College, Cambridge, whose alumni range from Milton to the present Archbishop of Canterbury and Sacha Baron Cohen. On the anniversary itself there's a dinner (£5,000 a head) to raise money for a collaboration between Christ's College and the Galapagos.

Darwin arrived at Christ's in 1828 and took rooms in First Court ("capital rooms they were", he later wrote). His tiny bedroom and larger sitting room have just been painstakingly restored to their original condition, down to the printed cotton on the horsehair cushion coverings, the double-barrelled shotgun on the wall, the beetle cabinet and the Coddington microscope. The rooms open to the public later this month.

Two days before Darwin's birthday, I met the science historian Dr John van Wyhe in Darwin's sitting room, where he was making last-minute adjustments. The author of three books on Darwin to be published this year, the energetic Dr van Wyhe is founder and director of Darwin Online, launched in 2006, which claims to be the largest and most widely used Darwin resource ever created.

Another of Dr Van Wyhe's roles is that of tireless debunker of things we think we know about Darwin. After I helped him move a table into the centre of Darwin's sitting room, he reminded me that no, Darwin didn't come to Cambridge to read theology, and no, Darwin didn't keep the contents of "On the Origin of Species" secret for 20 years because he was appalled by what they contained.

I already knew--after reading two recent articles by Dr Van Wyhe--that Darwin didn't say that we come from monkeys; the "Origin of Species" isn't about the origins of life; Darwin didn't have a eureka moment in the Galapagos Islands; he wasn't an atheist; and he didn't come up with the term "survival of the fittest." Oh, and there wasn't a tremendous outcry when "Origin" was published as, for the most part, the Victorian public that received the book were "not biblical literalists".

In the courtyard outside Darwin's windows, there was a mass of green sheeting covering up a new bronze sculpture of Darwin that is going to be unveiled by the Duke of Edinburgh. Go into the Great Hall at Christ's and you can see a portrait of the elderly Darwin near a portrait of Milton. But the sculptor, Anthony Smith, a recent graduate of the college, told me that he wanted to capture the youthfulness of the undergraduate Darwin at Christ's. In his sculpture, the ardent naturalist (only 20 or 21 years old) perches informally on the arm of the bench, thereby allowing visitors to sit on the bench and have their photo taken.

After Cambridge, Darwin sailed round the world for five years on the HMS Beagle, a journey that's carefully reconstructed at London's Natural History Museum. "Darwin Big Idea Big Exhibition" includes two live exhibits from places on that journey: a green iguana and a ornate horned frog. (I say "live", but during my visit they remained stubbornly immobile.) Just as compelling an exhibit is a small notebook, open on the page where Darwin first sketched the tree of life and added the words just above: "I think".

After that voyage, Darwin never went abroad again, keeping in touch with his many contacts through his prolific letter-writing (which suited his stomach better, as he was mercilessly prone to sea-sickness). It seems appropriate that the simplest and most colourful celebration of his life is the new set of Royal Mail stamps issued today. Designed like jigsaw pieces (yes, his ideas interlock), they include the well-known portrait of Darwin (First class, 36p); the face of a marine iguana (48p); four beaks of Galapagos finches (50p); a photo of a Pacific atoll (56p); a picture of a bee orchid (72p); and the face of an orang-utan (81p).

New TV and radio programmes range, alphabetically, from "Darwin's Children" to "Darwin's Conundrum" to "Darwin's Dangerous Idea" to "Darwin's Garden" to "Darwin's Struggle". Sir David Attenborough's own contribution, "Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life", includes many clips from earlier documentaries by Sir David going back to the 1970s, which allows the viewer to study the evolution of our greatest living natural history presenter. His presence has somewhat confused the debate over Darwin and religion as some critics have taken to thinking of Attenborough as God.

After his Beagle trip, Darwin married his first cousin, Emma Wedgwood, and moved to Down House in Kent. This is where he mapped out his theory on evolution, and also managed to sire ten children. One biographer, Cyril Aydon, writes that Darwin did not believe in contraception. "It was his belief that the multiplication of the British middle classes was one of the best guarantees of the advancement of civilization." (He might have been cheered by the report in this week's Economist that for the first time in history more than half the world is middle-class.) English Heritage has created a £1m exhibition at Down House, which opens on Friday. It includes a copy of "Das Kapital", signed by "his sincere admirer" Karl Marx.

With so many children, he was bound to have some interesting descendants. His great-great-grand daughter, Ruth Padel, has authored the most stimulating and surprising birthday tribute: "Darwin – A Life in Poems". This collection of biographical poems brings out Darwin's intense emotional life and sense of wonder. To take a single line from an early poem, Padel writes: "At eighteen he falls in love–with marine invertebrates".

Picture credit: public domain (top), dogfrog (via Flickr)

(Robert Butler is a former theatre critic. He now blogs on the arts and the environment at the Ashden Directory and writes the Going Green column in Intelligent Life. He also writes features, such as this one on a month in the life of the National Theatre in London.)