Niles Eldredge - The Darwin Blogs

The Darwin Blogs – March 5, 2006.

The Darwin Exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History, New York –#1
And Some News.

I have finally returned to the New York metropolitan area after three weeks of conferences in Milan, Italy, and two weeks of intensive research with David Kohn in Cambridge, England, deciphering Darwin’s diaries and notes written while he was still on the H.M.S. Beagle. (See previous three blogs on these adventures). Great to have had such a wonderful shot at watching the young Darwin, actively puzzling out the geology of South America—and getting the kernels that led him to evolution, and eventually his place as one of the great thinkers of western world science.

It was a delight to introduce my colleague Margaret Wertheim yesterday (Sat. March 4) to the Darwin Exhibition (Margaret and I regularly travel the country presenting perspectives on the relationship between science and religion—more on this in future blogs). And it was good for me, as well, to revisit this rich and exciting exhibition after being away for nearly a month.

A few blogs back I promised to recount my own perspectives on the contents of the exhibition. Down the line I’ll also discuss the actual making of this exhibition—which many visitors have said is the best on any scientific topic they have ever had the pleasure to visit.

The American Museum of Natural History’s website offers a terrific step-by-step tour of the exhibition—by far the next best thing to being there (http://amnh.org/exhibitions/darwin/). What follows here and in successive blogs (the sequence occasionally interrupted by breaking news and guest bloggers) is my own take on the intent and content of the show.

The Exhibition centers around the life and work of Charles Robert Darwin, bringing Darwin’s ideas up-to-date as we examine the main themes and status of current research in evolutionary biology. The basic goal is simple: to reveal in multiple formats what Darwin saw, how he came to evolution in the first place; how his thinking matured as he discovered natural selection—and what the overall, overwhelming evidence in the natural world is for evolution in general. These “multiple formats” include (1) specimens of fossils and modern species (some of the animals and plants being live—a big hit in the exhibition; you can see live cam streaming of our two Galapagos tortoises at the AMNH website); (2) original documents (letters, notebooks, diaries etc.) written by Darwin—as well as letters from family and colleagues relevant to the story; (3) many of Darwin’s personal effects (e.g. his geological hammer, his Bible—and much more—including a terrific recreation of his study where he wrote On the Origin of SpeciesDescent of Man and other books; I was at the original study at Down House just last week, and it is striking how well our recreation for the exhibition captures the essence of the real thing!); and (4) film and interactive media. Museum exhibitions differ from all other media in that they primarily consist of real solid objects. Knowing that the documents on display are the original, for example, has greatly enhanced the public’s interest in the exhibition. And, of course, there is nothing like some good old giant fossil animals and a rich assortment of exotic birds, reptiles and plants to catch the eye of the visitor.

Before actually entering the actual exhibition from the Hall of Reptiles and Amphibians, two live Galapagos tortoises are there to greet you. Roughly fifteen years in age (and of hard-to-determine sex), the tortoises are actually hybrid offspring of parents from different islands—hence different varieties—born in the United States. They, the live green iguana and live frogs in the exhibition are under the constant supervision and care of professional herpetologists.

You can see the other main feature of the entry-way into the exhibition on this website: that’s me standing below and just to the side of Charles Darwin on the large panel introducing the exhibition—a panel that simply says that Darwin’s evolutionary ideas are central to modern biological science and constitute the core of one of the greatest ideas in intellectual history. We tell the visitor that though there is still opposition to the very idea of evolution, the scientific evidence for evolution is overwhelming. Evolution is the only scientific theory that accounts for the rich diversity of life on earth—a diversity that has been evolving ever since life first appeared on earth over 3.5 billion years ago!

We also feature a short film with scientists from the American Museum of Natural History, The Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, The Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, and the Natural History Museum of London (the latter three venues where the exhibition will travel after it leaves New York). All of these “talking heads” discuss how the concept of evolution is absolutely central to their research—even in fields as seemingly remote from biology as astrophysics! Though I myself appear in the film discussing the evolution of trilobites (focus of my own research in paleontology), my favorite segment stars Dr. Melanie Stiassny, an ichthyologist at the American Museum. Melanie is an expert in freshwater fishes of the lakes of eastern Africa; in the film she says that had Darwin known about her fishes, he would have formulated his evolutionary ideas even more quickly—as the incredible diversity of these fishes reflects “evolution on steroids”!

Next time we’ll actually step into the exhibition itself. Meanwhile, my news this week is that the exhibition is featured in two interviews I recently filmed—both now available on the Web. The first is a tour of the exhibition and in Central Park just across the street from the Museum—“A Walk in the Woods”—with Jim Gorman, Editor of The Science Times (of the New York Times). You can see this film at www.nytimes.com//pages/science and scroll down to Multimedia Video and click on “A Walk in the Woods.”

The second filmed interview was for the Newshour with Jim Lehrer—the nightly news show on PBS. You can catch this at http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/science/jan-june06/darwin_3-01.html. There is a full transcript of the interview at this site—plus the video—which features many good shots of the Darwin exhibition.

Niles Eldredge

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