Charles Darwin would no doubt be surprised to learn that, 127 years after his death, people around the world will be celebrating his 200th birthday on Thursday.

Biology’s “reluctant revolutionary,” as English historian James Moore calls him, was a quiet man and frequently ill. But there will be nothing low-key about “Darwin Day,” the anniversary of the English naturalist’s Feb. 12, 1809, birth.

The official celebration website (darwinday.org) lists 281 events in 31 nations, including more than 170 in the USA. Events range from “Evolutionpalooza!” at the San Francisco Main Branch Public Library to an all-day reading of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (its 150th anniversary year) at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wis.

“Darwin was it,” says paleontologist Robert Carroll of McGill University in Montreal, who is giving a public talk at the university’s Redpath Museum.

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