Today is the 198th birthday of Charles Darwin, so to celebrate I’m linking to lots of webpages on the topic. Yes, I’m a party animal.

Every day is Darwin Day for UCD prof
Kansas celebrates Darwin Day: Documentary film premiered, evolution exhibits displayed as part of festivities
Happy Darwin Day! Celebrating mankind’s discovery of eugenics.
Cosmic Log: Happy Darwin Day
Celebrate Charles Darwin’s birthday – at church
Evolution Sunday Links Science and Religion

That’s enough for me. If you want more, visit Google News.

Darwin Day is a celebration of the scientific method. Yes, that thing you were supposedly taught in primary school.

The scientific method involves the following basic facets:

• Observation. A constant feature of scientific inquiry.

• Description. Information must be reliable, i.e., replicable (repeatable) as well as valid (relevant to the inquiry).

• Prediction. Information must be valid for observations past, present, and future of given phenomena, i.e., purported “one shot” phenomena do not give rise to the capability to predict, nor to the ability to repeat an experiment.

• Control. Actively and fairly sampling the range of possible occurrences, whenever possible and proper, as opposed to the passive acceptance of opportunistic data, is the best way to control or counterbalance the risk of empirical bias.

• Falsifiability, or the elimination of plausible alternatives. This is a gradual process that requires repeated experiments by multiple researchers who must be able to replicate results in order to corroborate them. This requirement, one of the most frequently contended, leads to the following: All hypotheses and theories are in principle subject to disproof. Thus, there is a point at which there might be a consensus about a particular hypothesis or theory, yet it must in principle remain tentative. As a body of knowledge grows and a particular hypothesis or theory repeatedly brings predictable results, confidence in the hypothesis or theory increases.

• Causal explanation. Many scientists and theorists on scientific method argue that concepts of causality are not obligatory to science, but are in fact well-defined only under particular, admittedly widespread conditions. Under these conditions the following requirements are generally regarded as important to scientific understanding:

• Identification of causes. Identification of the causes of a particular phenomenon to the best achievable extent.
• Covariation of events. The hypothesized causes must correlate with observed effects.
• Time-order relationship. The hypothesized causes must precede the observed effects in time.

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