This week, the University community celebrates the birth of a man who shook the world with his non-conforming ideas.

Alaskan artist Ray Troll presents his artwork at a Darwin Day lecture Tuesday. Discussions, displays and events will happen on campus throughout the week to honor Charles Darwin.

Feb. 12 marks the 201st birthday of Charles Darwin, the British naturalist who discovered species have descended over time from common ancestors, and the University is honoring the occasion with “Darwin Day,” a week of events intending to bring scientists together with non-scientists to learn what it means to be human.

Darwin is famous for his well-known idea of evolution published in his book “On the Origin of Species” after he traveled on the HMS Beagle and noticed variation in the species he observed.

“Lots of discoveries have been based on his theory of evolution. It is the cornerstone for further scientific thought,” said Tom Mansfield,a junior studying anthropology.

Darwin laid the foundation of understanding how all species evolved, including Homo sapiens, but today scientists still actively research and find out new things about the natural world and how it has changed.

“In a way, evolutionary thought is still evolving. As a community of minds, we are trying to learn more about how things work, how we evolved, how the world came to be what it is today,” said Rene Bobe, assistant professor of anthropology.

On Friday, Bobe will talk about how humans emerged from Africa and how they evolved to cope with unstable climatic and environmental conditions in an unpredictable world.

“I think the story of our origins is fascinating,” Bobe said. “Aren’t you interested in how we came to be the species we are today?”

Throughout the week, the University Bookstore is exhibiting books about evolution and the Odum School of Ecology has paintings by Jamie Calkin depicting hominin — the last common ancestor between humans and chimps.

However, the main learning opportunities may just be the lectures and presentations.

Ray Troll, an Alaskan artist, is focusing on the art and science of fossils, while Bobe and John Hawks, an anthropologist from the University of Wisconsin, spotlight the essence of humanity. There will also be a panel discussion Thursday between a geneticist, anthropologist and psychologists on what it means to be human.

“Even if you accept and understand that human beings share a biological common ancestry with the other apes and all living creatures, there remains the question ‘What makes us unique? What makes us human?’” said Mark Farmer, department head of cellular biology, who organized the events.

Raymond Freeman-Lynde, associate professor of geology, will have casts of various dinosaur fossils on display to show how evolution has been useful in determining the age of rocks and the fossil record.

“Dinosaurs and birds are cool and how birds evolved from dinosaurs is a great example of how evolution works,” he said.

Farmer said the goal of Darwin Day is to bridge the gap between science and humanities.

At the University, the event has only happened twice — once in 1909 on the centennial of Darwin’s birth and last year on the bicentennial.

Farmer, along with Betty Jean Craige in the Willson Center for Arts and Humanities intend to make this an annual event.

“His ideas, not Darwin himself, are important to all science in that they fundamentally changed the way we view our place in the universe,” Farmer said.

Even though evolution was proposed 150 years ago, people still resist the theory.

But according to Freeman-Lynde, Farmer and Bobe, Darwin did not intend to challenge spiritual beliefs.

As Darwin himself said, “In the long history of humankind — and animal kind, too -— those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.”