The day was February 12, 1809. The place was Shrewsbury, England. The person born there: Charles Darwin. With the publication of his classic, On the Origins of Species, Darwin set the wheels in motion for a dramatic transformation of the way human beings understand the world and how we came to exist in it . Here, seven speakers who’ve discussed what Darwin proposed on the TED stage:

Steven Johnson: Where good ideas come from
“Darwin himself, in his autobiography, tells the story of coming up with the idea for natural selection as a classic ‘eureka!’ moment. He’s in his study, it’s October of 1893 …”

Michael Pollan gives a plant’s eye view
“Who’s the more sophisticated species? Well, we’re all equally sophisticated. We’ve been evolving just as long, along different paths. It’s a cure for self-importance, a way to sort of make us feel the Darwinian idea.”

Robert Full on engineering and evolution
“Really, evolution works more like a tinkerer than an engineer.  This is really important when you begin to look at animals.”

Dan Dennett: Cute, sexy, sweet, funny
“I’m going around the world giving talks about Darwin, and usually what I’m talking about is Darwin’s strange inversion of reasoning. Now that title, that phrase, comes from a critic …”

Jonathan Haidt: Religion, evolution and the ecstasy of self-transcendence
“In The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin wrote a great deal about the evolution of morality. Where did it come from? Why do we have it?”

Juan Enriquez: Will our kids be a different species?
“The first place where you would expect to see enormous evolutionary pressure today, both because of the inputs — which are becoming massive — and because of the plasticity of the organ, is the brain.”

Dennis Dutton: A Darwinian theory of beauty
“How can we explain this universality? The best answer lies in trying to reconstruct a Darwinian evolutionary history of artistic and aesthetic tastes. We need to reverse-engineer them.”

Via the Nature blog The Great Beyond: a “rather wonderful graphic” from Ben Fry that tracks the changes across all six editions of The Origin of Species, as Darwin refined and developed his idea in print from 1859 to 1872.

Fry’s visualization of Darwin’s edits is called “On the Origin of Species: The Preservation of Favoured Traces,” and it’s pretty mesmerizing — you watch as color-coded text is added and dropped from edition to edition, and you can mouse over to see each exact passage as it gets crisper and detail is added. The Great Beyond quotes Fry:

“The idea that we can actually see change over time in a person’s thinking is fascinating,” says Fry. “Darwin scholars are of course familiar with this story, but here we can view it directly, both on a macro-level as it animates, or word-by-word as we examine pieces of the text more closely.”

Watch the evolution of the idea of evolution >>