1959 Darwin Centennial Celebration

The Darwin Centennial Celebration of 1959 was a worldwide celebration of the life and work of British naturalist Charles Darwin that marked the 150th anniversary of his birth (February 12, 1809), the 100th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species (November 24, 1859), and the 125th anniversary of the second voyage of HMS Beagle. The major center of festivities and commemoration was the University of Chicago, which hosted a five-day event (November 24 to November 28), organized by anthropologist Sol Tax, that attracted over 2,500 registered participants from across the world. According to historian V. Betty Smocovitis, the Chicago celebration "outshone-and arguably may still outshine-all other scientific celebrations in the recent history of science."

The celebration took place in the wake of the evolutionary synthesis of the 1930s and 1940s and the emergence, by the mid-1950s, of an organized scientific discipline of evolutionary biology, and was an opportunity for biologists of many stripes to lay claim to the legacy of Darwin. It was also a chance for American biologists, and the American Society for the Study of Evolution, to out-compete parallel British events, and for the University of Chicago to assert its emerging position as an important scientific institution.

Planning for the Darwin centennial began in the mid-1950s. In 1955 the Darwin Anniversary Committee, Inc., which included a number of Darwin's descendants as honorary officers, formed to coordinate anniversary events worldwide. Various other organizations, including the Society for the Study of Evolution (SSE), the American Scientific Affiliation, various biological journals and scientific societies and institutions in many countries, also began planning independent activities and commemorative publications. After the evolutionary synthesis, whose founders sought to make genetics-based evolution by natural selection the central uniting principle of all biology, almost all of the most prominent evolutionists in the world—with the notable exception of Julian Huxley, the public face of evolution in England—were Americans. Early in the planning there was considerable tension between the American-based SSE and the heavily British Darwin Anniversary Committee (which included Huxley).

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