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THE NEW YORK TIMES
Weekend Arts
Front Page
November 18, 2005
Circulation 1,149,700
Exhibition Review
Denis Finnin, American Museum of Natural History
The green iguana is one of the many live
species included in "Darwin." Also included in
the exhibition is Charles Darwin’s sketch of an
evolutionary tree, left.
Enough to Make an Iguana
Turn Green: Darwin's Ideas
By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
Published: November 18, 2005
DURING the years in which Charles Darwin was working on his revolutionary book, "On the Origin
of Species," and later, with more intensity, in the 1860's, when controversy raged over his ideas, the
naturalist was plagued with bouts of gastric trauma, sometimes accompanied by severe eczema. The
illness was never diagnosed, and various hypotheses about a tropical parasite, picked up during
Darwin's five years traversing the world aboard the HMS Beagle, have not been widely accepted.
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At the very least, though, one could guess from Darwin's suffering the toll it took to spend more than
20 years scrutinizing specimens of bone, feather and leaf, meticulously chronicling habitats and
behaviors and creating a theory that tried to explain the entire development of the animal and plant
kingdoms. That theory has become so familiar, it is easy to forget how bizarre and shocking it really
is; it still inspires some with outrage and disbelief.
The strangeness of that theory also does not really emerge in the sweeping new exhibition devoted to
Darwin's life and ideas at the American Museum of Natural History (which opens tomorrow and will
be on view until May 29, before traveling to science museums in Boston, Chicago, Toronto and
London). Instead, this show, with almost too much propriety, makes Darwin's theory of evolution
seem - well, almost natural. That is both a virtue and a flaw: the theory becomes clear but not its
revolutionary character. The exhibition is billed as the "broadest and most complete collection ever
assembled of specimens, artifacts, original manuscripts and memorabilia related to Darwin." By the
time one works through it, it has so successfully given a sense of the theory's explanatory power that
the exhibition can seem too small for its subject rather than too large. But it should be seen.
Curated by Niles Eldredge, a Darwin scholar and curator of the museum's division of paleontology,
the exhibition offers a habitat of Darwiniana. It is handsomely populated with animals (even live
ones), orchids, fossils, films, interactive video screens and historical documents and objects, some on
loan from Down House, Darwin's longtime home in England; the Natural History Museum in London
(which will present the exhibition in 2008-9); and Cambridge University Library. And for the most
part, the elements cohabit in extraordinary harmony, recounting the course of a life and the evolution
of its ideas.
Two live Galápagos tortoises, each weighing nearly 50 pounds, welcome the viewers into the
exhibition, which also includes live Argentinian horned frogs and a green iguana - all displayed in
glass-enclosed habitats resembling the ones Darwin believed led to the animals' distinctive coloring
and character. There is a cartoon a classmate drew of the aspiring naturalist mounted on a giant beetle
waving a butterfly net; a letter to his father in which Darwin, at age 22, pleaded to be allowed to join
the crew of the Beagle as the ship's naturalist; and scanned images of Darwin's herbarium sheets
showing leaves and stems collected during that voyage. Notebooks in which Darwin's ideas about
evolution began to coalesce are here, as is - in a sure sign of canonization - a replica of Darwin's
studio, complete with his walking stick and microscope.
But the exhibition actually domesticates Darwin and his theory. Think, instead, of the theory's daring.
Darwin was asserting that over the course of millenniums, miraculous bodily organs have taken shape
out of prehistoric crudities, species have changed their characters and turned into completely different
creatures, and human beings have come into existence, all because of accidental events and the brute
forces of nature. Chance, in league with danger, created both the eye and the orchid, the ocelot and the
man. Now imagine asserting these ideas when no one knew anything about genetic inheritance or
mutation. Darwin's digestive discomfort makes sense; in a way, so do contemporary discomforts with
his work.
In an 1844 letter on display, Darwin said that beginning to write about his ideas was "like confessing a
murder." He did not publish them for well over a decade, until he was spurred by the prospect of
competition, when a young novice naturalist, Alfred Russel Wallace, sent Darwin a letter that eerily
echoed some of his long-gestating ideas. After generously sharing some credit and helping to arrange
for simultaneous publication of their primary ideas in 1858, Darwin set to work on his magnum opus,
"On the Origin of Species."
In its sheer accumulation of objects and displays, the exhibition gives a sense of the wealth of
information and experience Darwin himself had to sift through. It is shaped chronologically, as a
journey through Darwin's life, punctuated with clear texts that highlight the connection between the
objects on display and the ideas taking shape. The voyage on the Beagle, for example, offered a
panorama of the natural world, through which Darwin peered, prodding, probing, describing
everything he saw. Why did some extinct species seem to resemble those that took their place? Why
did similar environments sometimes include very different species? What relationship was there
between a place and the animals that lived there?
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The Galápagos Islands presented a kind of astounding laboratory. Creatures on one island developed
isolated from those on another, the accidents of habitat somehow producing birds and tortoises with
different colorations or shapes. Darwin surmised that such variation developed out of common
ancestry, an idea that would, he said, "undermine the stability of Species," challenging the notion that
species possessed eternal stability.
Darwin was indefatigable, obsessed and all too aware that his ideas were cutting close to the spiritual
and cultural home that had been constructed by religious belief. His wife, Emma, worried that the
Darwins might not, given their different religious perspectives, be spending eternity in the same place;
Charles shed tears over their differences. But he also instructed Emma in another document, that if he
were to die before finishing his work, 500 pounds could be set aside from his estate to ensure its
compilation and continuation.
Both worlds were shaken when Annie, one of the 10 children they were to have, died when she was
10. A writing box, preserved by her parents, is filled with the girl's treasures; instead of fossils and
beetles, there are neatly wound embroidery thread, a quill pen, and - added later - her father's chart
chronicling her tuberculosis and a drawn map of her grave.
Darwin was shattered by the death of his "poor, dear, dear child," though in his universe, death had a
very different meaning than it did in Emma's. But he must have hung on to aspects of her world. The
term, "natural selection," after all, almost personifies nature, as if there were some force selectively
working toward an end. The terminology had a religious cast, as Darwin well knew, but the
implications of his ideas, as his illness attests, were far more unsettling.
The exhibition, in fact, falls short in not showing just how provocative and revolutionary Darwin's
theory is. The introductory section, about the world before Darwin, shows an astonishing collection of
skeletons from the museum's collection in a curiosity cabinet that displays each species with its own
set of bones and shape - a collection of representative models. A counterpart reflecting Darwin's
theory could have also been shown, reordering the creatures, or perhaps a Darwinian "tree" could have
displayed the species branching out from each other as they evolved.
The theory is also made to seem too invulnerable, particularly toward the exhibition's end, where
recent views about evolution are surveyed and recent evidence for the theory presented.
Perhaps in reaction to the various attempts to get notions of "intelligent design" taken seriously in
science classrooms the exhibition ends up minimizing scientific questions about the theory as well.
"For 150 years," the wall text states, "the theory of evolution by natural selection has not been
seriously challenged by any other scientific explanation."
But the point would have been even stronger had the museum acknowledged that Darwin's theory has
indeed been subject to scientific modification, and still is. The exhibition does not draw attention to
these issues, though Mr. Eldredge's own biography on the museum's Web site points out that he was
one of the scientists (including Stephen Jay Gould) "challenging Darwin's premise that evolution
occurs gradually," asserting instead that it occurs in spurts with long periods of stasis. Doesn't this
modify the idea of the "survival of the fittest" in an important way? It would have been worth pointing
out, too, why this modification was proposed: the fossil record doesn't provide the plentiful examples
of continuous evolution that Darwin's theory predicts.
If examples like that - about the evolution of Evolution - had been included with more discussion, one
of the crucial aspects of a scientific theory would have been illustrated: that it is subject to change and
modification, that the pressures of ever-increasing knowledge have the power to kill off some ideas
while permitting others to flourish. Such a theory is continually evolving, rather than eternally
comforting - which can itself induce vertigo.
"Darwin" opens tomorrow at the American Museum of Natural History, Central Park West and 79th
Street; (212) 769-5100. It runs through May 29.
Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
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'Darwin' In New York
Nov. 30, 2005
(CBS) This article was written for CBSNews.com by Muni S. Jaitly.
Amidst a roiling national debate on whether intelligent design deserves a place in public school curriculums, a new exhibit in New
York sheds light on the man behind the controversy: Charles Darwin.
The new exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History is being hailed as the most in-depth exhibition ever mounted on Darwin,
the father of evolution theory. The exhibit features artifacts from his life, and elements of his studies on beetles and animals of the
Galapagos Islands.
Vivien Magasiner, 62, was in town from South Africa and said she did her homework before getting on the plane to New York. "We
believe in Darwin, absolutely we are there. Evolutionary theory is not anti-faith," she said.
Richard Lustberg, 53, came to "Darwin" to broaden and enrich his children. "Just because evolutionary theory says we came out of
the seas doesn’t mean a supreme being had no part in it," he said.
The controversy, which has been making headlines in recent months, revolves around evolutionary theory and its place in public
classrooms.
Proponents of Darwin in the classrooms argue that his theory hasn’t been disproved in over 100 years and that it’s just science.
Those against evolutionary theory argue that Darwin doesn’t leave room for intelligent design, the idea that complex organisms were
created by a supreme being (i.e. God) on purpose.
Earlier this month, citizens of Dover, Penn., voted out of office all school board members who were in favor of intelligent design in the
classroom. Further west, the Kansas State Board of Education ruled that intelligent design theory should be included in the high
school curriculum.
The opening of the exhibit was three years in the making; no one on the museum had any idea that evolution would be such a hot
button issue in 2005, said Dr. Christopher J. Raxworthy, Associate Dean of Science for Education and Exhibition at the museum.
"Our exhibition presents evidence and scientific understanding of Darwin’s work. [Evolutionary] theory is not a hunch. It is a robust
body of knowledge," he said.
The exhibit includes actual beetles Darwin collected throughout his lifetime (he was fascinated by them since childhood), fossils, and
ferns like the ones he studied. A green iguana and Galapagos turtle are part of the live attractions.
Artifacts from his life include a rock hammer, magnifying glass, and the Bible he kept with him on his travels. Halfway through the
exhibit is a recreation of Darwin’s cluttered study, filled with furniture, stationery and liquor jar.
Jack Albert, 77, was fascinated by the collection. "I was interested in Darwin. It’s great to understand it all," he said.
Darwin’s genius was in finding a viable mechanism for evolution; but he wasn’t the first to propose that all life shared common
ancestor. Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, had speculated that species had evolved.
In 1831, Darwin sailed around the world aboard the HMS Beagle, a tiny ship some 90 feet long. The journey, which took the crew
around the coast of South America, enabled Darwin to see the natural world, retrieve fossils, ferns, and live animals from species
across a continent -- something scientists didn’t get a chance to do at the time. He called the trip the most "important event of his
lifetime."
"Ultimately Darwin was patient and good at observing things. He had a very broad understanding and was able to connect the dots,"
said Dr. Raxworthy.
Darwin made his most critical observations at the islands of the Galapagos. Species on these islands resembled those on land
hundreds of miles away, but Darwin noticed differences within species from island to island.
His conclusion: species evolved over time. How else could he explain slight differences, like the shape of a finch’s beak, from island
to island?
For 20 years, Darwin sat on evolutionary theory, afraid that his writings would offend the Church and its followers who believed that a
supreme being created man. In 1844 Darwin wrote to a friend that publishing his thoughts on evolution would be like “confessing a
murder.”
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Before Darwin finally published "The Origin Of Species" in 1859, humans were not considered part of the natural world. As the exhibit
shows, back then it was unthinkable that all life was related; it was an ‘us versus them’ mentality.
Darwin’s theory of evolution, involving concepts of common traits, survival of the fittest, and natural selection, was truly revolutionary.
His theory encapsulated the vast and marvelous diversity of life on Earth. Darwin did so using his eyes and the simplest of tools -without electricity.
A section of the exhibit reads, "Still, nothing we have seen contradicts the essence of Darwin’s theory."
What’s striking, says Dr. Raxworthy, is the simplicity of Darwin’s theory. "Yet it has given us a new understanding of the world."
Dr. Raxworthy said in many ways it’s fortunate that evolution is getting more attention by the media. "It is a great opportunity for
people to come through and draw their own conclusions ... Hopefully people will come to accept evolution."
Roger Brunson, 26, said of the exhibit, "It’s important to find a compromise between faith and theory. It’s also important to be aware of
the controversy."
"Darwin" is at the American Museum Of Natural History until May 29, 2006. The exhibition will make stops in Boston, Chicago, and
Toronto.
By Muni S. Jaitly
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December 4, 2005
latimes.com : Print Edition : A Section
THE NATION
Exhibit Explores the Evolution of Darwin's Ideas and Research
• The display comes at a time when the teaching of the naturalist's theories faces increasing attack.
By Robert Lee Hotz, Times Staff Writer
NEW YORK — Passing two ponderous Galapagos tortoises, the ninth-graders arrived at the origin of a
150-year struggle between science and faith-based beliefs, where the contested terrain is every student's
mind.
The tortoises, living icons of Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection, belong to the most
comprehensive exhibition ever assembled on the life and thought of the 19th century naturalist.
The display, which opened two weeks ago, at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, is a
collaboration of five leading natural science centers in three countries. More than a retrospective of one
scientist's achievement, it walks the visitor through Darwin's lifetime voyage of intellectual discovery, a
journey that culminated in his theory of evolution.
The ninth-graders from Queens High School of the Sciences are among the 30,000 visitors who have
come so far to muse on the memorabilia and manuscripts of a man who, pondering the infinite variety of
life, formulated the foundation of modern biology and transformed humanity's perception of itself.
"It is beautiful," said Queens student Swati Kumar, 14. "It really showed how evolution worked."
The exhibition comes at a time when the teaching of Darwin's work increasingly is under attack by
conservative Christian groups around the world.
Indeed, even as the Queens students on Friday perused Darwin's handwritten notes and gawked at a live
5-foot-long green iguana, courts in Georgia and Pennsylvania were considering whether faith-based
alternatives to Darwin's scientific theory should be permitted a foothold in science classrooms. Last
month, the Kansas state Board of Education rewrote its science standards to make room for faith-based
teachings.
In a sense, the exhibit was the scientific community's considered response to the growing challenge of
intelligent design and creationism.
"It is the minds of American high school students that are at stake," said University of Georgia Darwin
scholar Edward J. Larsen, who won the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for his history of controversies over the
teaching of Darwin's work.
With a permanent research collection of more than 30 million specimens and artifacts, the American
Museum, which took the lead role in the exhibition, is "evolution central," Larsen said.
Museum president Ellen V. Futter said curators organized the Darwin display because "American
education in science and mathematics is failing dreadfully — in ways that undermine the country's
economy and security and yield public confusion about major scientific issues, including the origins and
diversity of life on Earth."
The exhibition features Darwin's love letters, the tools he carried aboard the HMS Beagle and the red
leather notebooks in which he worked out his ideas.
Curators recreated the study where, seated in a wing-chair by a fireplace, Darwin wrote the books that
revolutionized biology. They also duplicated a stretch of the Galapagos Islands that inspired him,
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complete with red crabs, sea iguanas and a flock of blue-footed boobies.
"It is really wonderful that we have so many original objects from Darwin's life — original field notebooks,
private correspondence, manuscripts, cartoons that friends drew of him as a boy, the magnifying glass he
took with him on the Beagle," said Christopher J. Raxworthy, the museum's associate dean of science for
education.
"Many of these objects have not been together for 150 years," Raxworthy said.
The show, assembled at a cost of $3 million, will be at the New York museum until May 29. It will then
travel to the Boston Museum of Science, the Field Museum in Chicago and the Royal Ontario Museum in
Toronto, Canada. In 2008, it will open at the British Museum of Natural History in London, where it will
commemorate the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth.
Simply stated, Darwin's work uncovered a fundamental technical truth about reproduction and mortality.
In any species, more are often born than can survive. Any incremental hereditary advantage may favor
one over the other, depending on the circumstances in which they live. Those survivors will pass that
advantage on to their offspring. In this way, limbs could become wings, and apes, with sufficient time,
could evolve into human beings.
Darwin, as the exhibit documents, worked out this basic insight through meticulous scrutiny of thousands
of specimens gathered from around the globe and decades of painstaking breeding experiments.
He laid out his findings in his 1859 book "On the Origin of Species."
"There is a grandeur in this view of life," Darwin wrote. "From so simple a beginning, endless forms most
beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved."
Darwin was not the first to air the idea of evolution, but he was the first to conceive a biological
mechanism that explained how life might incrementally alter from one form into another over time.
No one was more aware than Darwin that by rejecting a literal biblical account of creation, his theory
would be considered an attack on Christianity and the established church of his day, the exhibition shows.
He kept his theory secret for 21 years, yet when he finally published it, his book became an instant
bestseller. Even so, he wrote a friend, "It was like confessing a murder."
To be sure, researchers have produced more than one idea that rattled the foundations of faith and
altered humanity's place in the scheme of things. Few people today will argue about quantum mechanics,
plate tectonics, the structure of the solar system or the cosmology of the Big Bang.
Darwin's carefully researched ideas on evolution, however, framed by geological evidence of Earth's
extreme antiquity, are as fiercely challenged by some today as when he first reluctantly revealed his
theory about 150 years ago, the exhibit notes.
The conflict between evolutionary biology and creationism is an especially American issue — a flashpoint
in a national culture war — said Florida State University philosopher Michael Ruse, author of "The
Evolution-Creation Struggle."
"I don't see this as a debate about science versus religion as such," said Ruse, who was visiting the
exhibition. "This is very much about a cultural clash we have in America today."
In recent years, however, organized resistance to the teaching of evolution has become more
international, said University of Wisconsin science historian Ronald L. Numbers, author of "The
Creationists." Faith-based creationist ideas have taken hold in Korea, Australia, Israel and Eastern
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Europe.
For the ninth-graders at the American Museum, the exhibit was their first sustained encounter with Darwin
and the theory of evolution. They won't study it formally until later in the school year.
"The bugs really amaze me," said Kendra Hunte, 14, lingering over Darwin's collection of beetles. "I never
knew you could find so much stuff in so short a time."
Andre Mozeak, 15, said: "It is kind of breathtaking to see everything he discovered. I never knew he went
to the Galapagos."
Brian Jetter, principal of Queens High School for the Sciences, who accompanied the students, said that
even for an experienced science educator like himself, the exhibit revealed something new.
"I didn't realize he was so diverse in the organisms he studied," Jetter said. "That was a revelation to me.
He saw this design in everything he looked at."
And, he said, the evidence Darwin amassed is overwhelming. "There is no denying that evolution
happened, and is happening even now."
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Darwin Gets His Due: Sciam Observations
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November 18, 2005
Darwin Gets His Due
By Kate Wong
"It is like confessing a murder." So wrote Charles Darwin in 1844 to botanist Joseph Hooker of his now famous theory of evolution
by natural selection. At the time, the dominant belief was that all species were created by God in their present form. So Darwin,
loath to provoke controversy, nurtured his idea in secret for nearly two decades before finally revealing it--first to a few trusted
colleagues, then to the world in his book, On the Origin of Species. Published in 1859, the book quickly became the talk of Victorian
England.
Tomorrow the Darwin exhibition opens at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. In it, visitors trace the steps of
the legendary naturalist leading up to the birth of the idea that today stands as the cornerstone of modern biology. And from the live
Galapagos tortoises stationed at the start of the exhibit to the orchid display at its end, the show is well worth the $21 price of
admission ($16 for students and seniors; $12 for kids).
Lucky for us, Darwin was a prolific letter-writer and journal-keeper, and many of his writings are on exhibit. The most thrilling, to my
mind, is a page from one of his notebooks on which he sketched the first evolutionary tree in 1837. It's nothing fancy, just a stick
figure with a trunk labeled 1, branches labeled A through D, and the words "I think" scrawled at the top. But it compellingly
illustrates his ground-breaking realization that all organisms on earth are related.
Darwin the man is also revealed, mostly through his correspondences. We find out that he was a slacker in school; that his father
thought his plan to sail around the world on the HMS Beagle was "a wild scheme" and nearly refused him permission to go; that he
made a list of the pros and cons of getting married before proposing to his first cousin Em ma Wedgwood; and that he agonized
over the anguish that his ideas caused his devout wife.
Darwin comes at a bewildering time for science education in our nation. It's nearly 150 years after the publication of On the Origin
of Species, yet creationist objections to teaching evolution in the classroom have created in some parts of the country an
intellectual climate not unlike that of Victorian England. To wit: the Kansas Board of Education's recent decision to approve new
public school science standards that cast doubt on evolution. Thankfully, though, voters in Dover, Penn., decided to oust the eight
members up for re-election to the school board that had been sued for introducing into the biology curriculum the notion of
intelligent design as a viable alternative to evolution. Niles Eldridge, curator of the Darwin exhibition, says of the show: "This is for
the school children of America. This is the evidence for evolution." Following its debut in New York, Darwin will travel to the Field
Museum in Chicago, the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, and, lastly, London's Natural History Museum. Too bad it's not going to
Kansas.
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