Niles Eldredge - The Darwin Blogs

The Darwin Blogs – February 3, 2006.

Teaching Darwin through the Darwin Exhibition – #1

I had the privilege of addressing 400 New York City school teachers yesterday evening. We were gathered outside the entrance to the exhibition Darwin, in the Hall of Reptiles and Amphibians at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. The teachers were there to learn more about the exhibition and the rich variety of supplemental educational materials prepared by the Museum’s Department of Education.

I spoke for about 20 minutes on the highlights of the exhibition. I told the group that, if there was one target audience we had in mind, it is the schoolchildren of America. The Darwin exhibition opens with Darwin’s magnifying glass—symbol of the story of this young man, Charles Robert Darwin, who took his love of the outdoors, his passion for beetle collecting, and his rudimentary training in botany, zoology and geology when he embarked on what he called “no doubt the most important event of my life”—his five-year trip around the world on H.M.S. Beagle (1831-1836). With very simple tools, and an open mind (Darwin was a creationist when he set forth—though more on this in a subsequent blog) Darwin came back from the trip a confirmed evolutionist.

Darwin left such a rich paper trail—his notebooks, diaries, letters to family and friends, and his manuscripts (many of which remained unpublished in his lifetime)—that we have the unprecedented opportunity to recreate the critical steps in one of the most important episodes of scientific creativity in the history of the western world. And that’s precisely what our main goal has been in creating the Darwin exhibition—to show the elements of Darwin’s creativity as we retrace his intellectual journal from callow youth to wise old age. We see what Darwin saw (I’ll discuss this in detail in forthcoming blogs) on the Beagle that led him to evolution in the first place—and understand how it was his capacity for intuitive thinking that was critical at the outset—before he became a more analytic, hypothetico-deductive thinker and, even later, a skilled experimentalist.

Above all, we want to convey to our visitors—especially visiting students—the sense that there is still much to be discovered in the natural world. The really critical element is the interplay between the open imaginative mind and the natural world: it is true that the tools scientists use today—electron microscopes, DNA probes, particle accelerators and the like—are crucial to pushing the boundaries of scientific knowledge still further. But the more fundamental basis of scientific discovery still lies in the interplay between one’s mind and the natural world.

In coming blogs I’ll review the steps in the exhibition that I discussed with the New York City teachers—revealing the formative steps in Darwin’s thinking. I will be traveling soon (for Darwin Day!) to Milan Italy, and then on to Cambridge, England where I will be examining Darwin’s notes from the Beagle voyage with Darwin scholar David Kohn. Stay tuned for Darwin reports from Europe!

Niles Eldredge

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