Iowa City Darwin Day, a grand celebration of science, will be held February 21-22 featuring speakers Carin Bondar, John Novembre, and Anya Prince. There will also be a talk by Elizabeth Yale “Illustrated Natural History in Victorian Britain: How Darwin and his contemporaries shared knowledge in books,” a free teacher workshop “Playing with Fire? How we perpetuate biological beliefs about race in the classroom and how we can avoid it,” a free workshop open to all “The Groundwater Approach: Building a practical understanding of structural racism,” and a screening of The Fly at FilmScene on the Ped Mall. All Iowa City Darwin Day events are free and open to the public.

The Iowa City Darwin Day 2020 guide offers additional books and media to accompany this year’s celebration! Visit the Sciences Library to see our new Iowa City Darwin Day Exhibit! Chauncey is wearing his favorite Iowa City Darwin Day t-shirt and hanging out with the finches, coral, and iguana on display! In addition to books by and about Darwin, we have books authored by Carin Bondar. A biologist and science communicator from the University of the Fraser Valley, Bondar is host of several TV series including Worlds Oddest Animal Couples (Animal Planet, Netflix), Stephen Hawking’s Brave New World (Discovery World HD, National Geographic) and Outrageous Acts of Science (The Science Channel). Bondar’s talk “Evolution and the Modern Mom: The unique conundrum of Homo sapiens” will be at noon on Sat, Feb 22 in Macbride Auditorium, Macbride Hall. At 3 PM at Prairie Lights, she will read from her book Wild Sex: The Science Behind Mating in the Animal Kingdom. 

Many thanks to the University of Iowa Museum of Natural History and Earth and Environmental Sciences Special Collections for loaning us their specimens!