In case you hadn’t noticed yet, we’re rapidly approaching the 200th birthday of Charlie Darwin. As the Darwin 200 celebrations become ever more frenzied, the Great Beyond will be rounding up the best of the world’s Darwin coverage, starting now.

More Darwin 200 stuff from Nature.

In the Times, columnist Simon Barnes gets very wound up over the science-vs-religion debate that has been cropping up more and more in Darwin Year:

In the mess and kerfuffle of the evolutionary slanging match – I shall not dignify it with the term debate – we have lost, perhaps deliberately, the main point. Evolution tells us that human beings are not something imposed on the planet, something radically different from every other aspect of life. Evolution is not a long-winded way of making human beings. Evolution does not separate humanity from the rest of life; it joins us. We are kith and kin with apes, with rats, with the Great Barrier Reef, with hummingbirds and eye-boring worms.

McClatchy Newspapers takes a similar line, noting that the “evolution war still rages 200 years after Darwin’s birth”.

The New York Times is running excerpts from Darwin’s Sacred Cause by Adrian Desmond and James Moore, detailing the importance of Charlie’s anti-slavery views to his work. “This, then, is the untold story of how Darwin’s abhorrence of slavery led to our modern understanding of evolution,” they say (the book is also reviewed by New Scientist).

Back to the religious angle, a new report from theology think tank Theos says:

According to a recent, detailed quantitative research study commissioned by Theos and conducted by the polling company ComRes, only 37% of people in the UK believe that Darwin’s theory of evolution is “beyond reasonable doubt”.

Actually, this conclusion isn’t really borne out by the data ComRes have released, which seems to show that the questioners studiously avoided asking the direct “do you believe in evolution” question. Instead they asked about people’s belief in creationism, evolution as God’s tool, evolution making belief in God ‘absurd’ and intelligent design.

Theos says the “full data analysis” will be available in March, maybe that will back up their claims better than these tables do.

Tune in later for more Darwin Delights.