Each year, humanist organizations around the world celebrate the birthday of Charles R. Darwin, whose ideas on the origins of life changed our understanding of the world—and our place in it—permanently. For nearly a decade, members of my research team, the New Paltz Evolutionary Psychology Lab, and I have given presentations in honor of Darwin Day (as this celebration is now called) for our local humanist organization: The Hudson Valley Humanists.

There are two critical reasons that Darwin’s ideological legacy sits so centrally in the humanist ethos. First, in spite of being a deeply religious Christian, Darwin's ideas ultimately came to underscore secularism, a broad term for any set of ethical and moral principles that are not connected with any particular religious ideology. The idea that humans—along with dandelions, mosquitoes, tulip trees, groundhogs, goldfinches, and emperor penguins—along with all other forms of life—came about by natural selection (see Darwin, 1859), focuses on natural/physical processes as shaping all life forms that have ever existed. This concept, which, as Darwin himself put it, suggests that "... there is grandeur in this view of life," is incongruous with origin explanations from any particular religious sect. This scientifically grounded view of the world is, the basis of secularism and of its sister ideology, secular humanism.

A second critical way that Darwinism paved the way for humanism is a corollary of his basic ideas on human life being rooted in natural selection. Darwin was a humanist at heart. In fact, there is a plentitude of data speaking to the fact that Darwin was not only an unabashed abolitionist, but that, in many ways, he was more of an abolitionist than was Abraham Lincoln (see Desmond and Moore's 2014 book, Darwin's Sacred Cause). While on his famous voyage around the world in the early 1800s, Darwin was quick to point out that people from places that were very different from his home were necessarily humans just like himself and his shipmates (in spite of others at the time disagreeing with him; see Eldredge, 2005).

In each........

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