On this day one-hundred and fifty-seven years ago (1 July 1850) Alfred Russell Wallace and Charles Darwin gave a joint reading of their papers to the Linnean Society in London, outlining their independently-reached theories of the process of natural selection. Natural selection was the first plausible mechanism that explained the alreadyobserved process of evolution, or change in species over time, and in fact explained the rise of new species from the contingent history of previous ones.
As P.Z. says, that makes today a scientific Independence Day.
G’head and celebrate by blowing some fireworks up or somethin’.