This year Eastern’s biology department will be celebrating its 12th annual Darwin Days lecture series.

The faculty members in charge of the series are biology professors Ann Fritz, Zhiwei Liu and Stephen Mullin, along with Gary Fritz, the director of the biotechnology center.

Darwin Days is an international series of events that was created to honor Charles Darwin, an English naturalist and geologist from the 1800s who was popular for his contributions to evolutionary theory.

In 1997, there was an organized movement by three Darwin enthusiasts to establish an annual International Darwin Day Celebration.

The enthusiasts were Robert Stephens, who motivated the Humanist Community in Silicon Valley to initiate an annual Darwin Day Celebration in 1995; Professor Massimo Pigliucci, who similarly organized annual Darwin Day events at the University of Tennessee beginning in 1997; and Amanda Chesworth, who joined Stephens to officially incorporate the Darwin Day Program in New Mexico in 2000.

Two years after that, the Darwin Day program was reincorporated in California as the Darwin Day celebration.

The celebration became a nonprofit education corporation promoting public education on science while encouraging the celebration of science and humanity throughout the world.

The celebration also created an advisory board of prominent scientists.

Eastern’s Darwin Day celebration will start Monday night with a lecture by Iowa State University’s Jill Pruetz, who is a part of the department of anthropology.

Her lecture is called “Life on the Savana” and will take place at 7 p.m. Monday in the Lecture Hall of the Doudna Fine Arts Center.

Tuesday night will feature a lecture by Indiana University’s Michael Muehlenbein, who works in the department of anthropology.

His lecture is called “Hormones, Health and Life Histories” and will be at 5 p.m. Tuesday in the Lecture Hall of Doudna.

Wednesday night will feature a video presentation on a BBC Horizon series called “Are We Still Evolving?” at 5 p.m. and will be shown in Room 2080 of the Life Science Building.

These events lead up to Feb. 12, which is the date of the Darwin Day this year.

Stephanie White can be reached at 581-2812 or at sewhite2@eiu.edu.