As you may have heard, this is the bicentennial year of Charles Darwin’s birth (and Abe Lincoln’s too, as a wag yelled out at our last café!). Coincidentally, it also happens to be the sesquicentennial of the publication of Darwin’s, “On the Origin of Species”, a book that changed the world like few others before or since. While the global community marks this special Darwin Day, February 12, 2009, with celebrations worldwide, we are offering our own small tribute: with a café lecture that Darwin himself would likely have enjoyed, over a cup’o’tea, on building the tree of life! Rick Zechman will share with us how the little tree that young Charlie Darwin doodled in his notebook, while sketching out his ideas on how life-forms may go extinct and give rise to other life-forms during the process of evolution, has led to the modern discipline of phylogenetics, and tell us about the ongoing endeavor to trace the ultimate Tree of Life on earth. I hope you will join us to celebrate Darwin’s legacy, and to raise your glass to the old man!