Darwin Day celebrates the 202nd anniversary Saturday of the birth of scientist Charles Darwin, best known for his work on evolution sciences.

Brian Gress, senior in psychology and vice president of ISU’s Atheist and Agnostic Society, said he couldn’t be happier with the attention Darwin Day has received during the last few years.

“Many of the celebrations throughout the country have been organized by either atheist or secular groups, but they benefit everyone in the community,” Gress said. “Des Moines became one of the first places in the world to recognize Darwin Day, which is great, but it was only the first step.”

Des Moines is one of the few places in the world that recognizes it as a public holiday. It was recently announced that American Atheists, an advocacy group for the civil rights of non-religious people and the separation of church and state, chose Des Moines as its host city for its 2011 national convention in April.

Gress said the next step is to promote throughout communities how Darwin’s challenge to conventional wisdom changed how we view the world.

“That’s the beauty of science and critical thinking,” Gress said. “We are discovering things that no one in the past would have imagined, and we’re doing it at a rate that no one could have predicted even a decade ago.”

Gress said Darwin Day is important to atheists in particular because Darwin’s discovery was the first scientific challenge to a religious world view.

“[Darwin] gave us a method for understanding the bottom-up process that was able to produce the diversity and complexity seen in living things today,” Gress said. “Prior to this, people were only aware of the top-down process of design. Things were viewed in the world and assumed to have a designer. Darwin turned this idea on its head.”

Kristoffer Scott, junior in electrical engineering and president of the Atheist and Agnostic Society, said the group plans to be a little more festive in this week’s Ask an Atheist booth, located near the west entrance of the Memorial Union.

Randy Henderson is the president of Iowa Atheists and Freethinkers, a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting local atheist, agnostic, secular humanist, free thinkers and other non-religious people. Henderson said Darwin Day is a celebration of scientific study and understanding.

“Darwin is probably one of the biggest free thinkers in terms of evolution, which has grown beyond being just a theory,” Henderson said. “[Darwin Day] is important in terms of who we are and where we come from.”

Henderson also believes religion can often supersede scientific study.

“Societies today are influenced by religion, and I think that gets in the way of setting aside a day to celebrate scientific discovery,” Henderson said.