Today is International Darwin Day, the annual celebration of the birth of the sage who changed the world in 1859. Institutions around the world are celebrating with events ranging from lectures to full-blown festivals. Right around February 12, you'll find many of your best opportunities to attend a public lecture by an eminent evolutionary biologist or eat a Darwin-shaped cookie. I hope you had a chance to grab one or both.

We've never had an official Darwin Day event at Cell Press (but be in touch if you want to co-host something, because that sounds really fun). But we do publish a lot of great science that Mr. Darwin would have read with great interest. Here are some recent gems.

A look at evolutionary science today

1. Cancer through the lens of evolution

This piece, part of the TrendsTalk series at Trends in Cancer, is a must-read. It's an interview with Professor Mel Greaves of the Institute of Cancer Research in London. It asks how evolutionary thought informs cancer research. Here's just one way:

[T]he resilience of advanced cancer to therapeutic assault is perhaps what you should expect of a semi-autonomous and robust cellular parasite. They can call on survival tactics for which there is a billion-year memory—playing by numbers with rare escapees fuelled by the lottery of random mutation, exploiting signal network plasticity or hunkering down in a dormant state. It's survival of the fittest. I started my scientific career in the 1960s learning evolutionary biology from John Maynard Smith and others, so I was primed, and maybe biased, from that point on. But somehow the answer now just seems so damned obvious.

2. Human neurons think they're special

We humans are naturally curious about our own brains, but those brains seem reluctant to just tell us how they work. One thing we know, from decades of experiments in other animals, is that learning and memory involve molecular processes that translate changes in neural activity into changes in synapses. But still we wonder whether there's something special about how we humans do this, since we're overly impressed by our human cognitive expertise.

A paper published last month in Cell Reports, Networks of Cultured iPSC-Derived Neurons Reveal the Human Synaptic Activity-Regulated Adaptive Gene Program by Hilmar Bading and colleagues, suggests that humans do in fact differ from other animals (mice, specifically) in how electrical activity in brain cells results in changes in gene expression. The authors show how relatively subtle genetic changes may have driven human brain evolution. They see, for example, that some human genes have acquired activity dependence that was absent in the common ancestor of humans and mice.

3. Evolutionary thinking and development of sustainable energy

The creative power of the Darwnian mechanism has been put to use in lots of contexts, perhaps most notably in drug discovery and related pursuits. One advantage of this approach is that it unleashes the search-and-destroy aspects of evolution with less emphasis on potentially flawed preconceptions. In last month's issue of Chem, Jose Avalos, Buz Barstow, and their colleagues encourage the application of evolutionary thinking to energy development in their paper Embracing Biological Solutions to the Sustainable Energy Challenge.

Their brilliant piece explores the intersection between a set of "biological capabilities"—the results of 3 billion years of evolutionary tinkering—and sustainable energy applications. (See the map of their article above.) They conclude with this:

The application of biology to sustainable energy will also require finding solutions to problems at the intersection of applied and basic research. Much as the invention of the airplane required advances in the basic science of aerodynamics, sustainable energy applications involving biology will require continued basic research into the fundamental principles of biology, ranging from evolutionary mechanisms and light-independent autotrophic metabolisms to carbon-fixation pathways and fundamental properties of biological materials.

A call to action on Darwin Day 2017

In 2017, there is another angle to Darwin Day. Evolution has always been a cultural battleground, especially in the United States. Long before anti-vaxxers and climate science denial, biologists lived in a world of organized misinformation designed to undermine evolutionary theory and discredit the scientists who study and teach it. But as of a few weeks ago, the president of the United States is a climate change "skeptic," and his cabinet includes people openly opposed to evolution as well as climate science.

Darwin Day 2017, then, is also about defending science in a time when it is under attack by people with a lot of power. So even if you missed a cool local event, it's never too late to celebrate Darwin Day by reading about science and by defending science and scientists.