Successful Darwin Day

Yesterday was a pretty successful Darwin Day. It's not a big celebration; only the biology majors are invited for a party to view a pretty good collection of Darwin's publications (TPP has a pretty good collection) and of course cake. So when you buy a pretty big cake and the students eat it all, you've had a good turnout. And, no sticky finger prints on the Darwin publications either. The idea is just to make our majors a bit more knowledgeable about Darwin's accomplishments.  Only one of them had actually read the Origin of Species, but she was surprised about all of Darwin's other books. Actually, the fact that most fascinated our students this year is that most of TPP's volumes were from editions published in the late 1800s, so nothing particularly valuable, but to today's students that is almost impossibly old. It was a good cake, florally decorated, but with dark blue frosting roses whose dye can go completely through the GI tract unchanged which makes for a rather surprising "out come".  The special event was reading the 22 questions asked by creationists posed after the Nye-Ham debate, mostly met with amusement, but while having answers, not comprehending why people would so respond. Ah, well, everything goes better with cake.