There's a funny rash that has broken out here in Cambridge, of orange neck ribbons. And sky blue book bags with a curious graphic reptile creeping across them. There are hundreds of people walking around town wearing them proudly. (I even saw Richard Dawkins in full garb earlier.) The orange neck ribbons and free giveaway book bags are entitlements you get free when you pick up a week's ticket for the Darwin Festival, and they are signs of the town's enthusiasm for the great man, which has overcome enough people to fill Cambridge's West Road Concert Hall, plus an overflow area in the Law Faculty's lecture theatre. 

To be fair, it's not just Cambridge, England which is enthusiastic about Darwin. There are people here from Minnesota, Japan and Cambridge, Massachusetts, too. The occasion is one of the biggest gatherings ever of Darwin scholars in one place, and the discussions range from Darwin's observations of his small children, to (tonight) Terry Pratchett talking about Darwin's influence on his Discworld books. 

Yesterday's high points for me were a fabulous talk by Gillian Beer, the Cambridge academic who has showed in the past how deeply influential Darwin was on the writers of his time, such as George Eliot and Thomas Hardy. Yesterday she talked with great power about how language is a strange and anomalous tool with which to describe the beauty and variety of the natural world. And of course, Prof Dawkins, who gave the audience a wonderful hippyish compilation powerpoint of video of animals swimming, running and trying to eat each other, whilst talking about Alfred Russel Wallace and Patrick Matthew in a way quite at odds with his normally waspish public image. 

Today continues with Matt Ridley, the writer famous for Genome, Nature Via Nuture, and his chairmanship of Northern Rock, and this afternoon I'm going to Jim Secord's session "From Penny Post to Podcast" about how changes in the speed and nature of communication change scientific progress. Can't wait to report back on that one. 

There are a few tickets left for the overflow and also for some of the surrounding talks, so if you live nearby, why not check out the website.