Niles Eldredge - The Darwin Exhibition

The Darwin Exhibition

Press Release

Darwin EXTENDED until August 20, 2006
at AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY

Landmark Exhibition Drawing Capacity Crowds

Darwin, the most in-depth exhibition ever mounted on this highly original thinker, geologist, and naturalist and his theory of evolution, has been extended throughAugust 20, 2006 at the American Museum of Natural History. This spectacular and timely exhibition has been enormously popular with Museum visitors, drawing capacity crowds of nearly 200,000 since it opened three months ago.

Darwin continues a series the Museum has developed on great thinkers, explorers, and scientists such as Leonardo da Vinci, Ernest Shackleton, and Albert Einstein. Visitors experience the wonders Darwin witnessed on his journey as a curious and adventurous young man aboard the HMS Beagle on its historic five-year voyage (1831–1836) to the Galápagos Islands and beyond.

The exhibition features live Galápagos tortoises and an iguana and horned frogs from South America, along with actual fossil specimens collected by Darwin and the magnifying glass he used to examine them. Darwin features an elaborate reconstruction of the naturalist’s study at Down House, where, as a revolutionary observer and experimenter, he proposed the scientific theory that all life evolves according to the mechanism of natural selection. The objects on display, coupled with illuminating text and interactive displays, provide a clear understanding of the patterns he observed among species, which led to his life’s work and publication of the astonishing and brilliant Origin of Species, wherein he assembled the massive evidence for his theory of evolution.

The American Museum of Natural History gratefully acknowledges The Howard Phipps Foundation for its leadership support. Significant support for Darwin has also been provided by the Austin Hearst Foundation, Jack and Susan Rudin, and Rosalind P. Walter. Additional funding provided by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and Dr. Linda K. Jacobs.

Darwin is organized by the American Museum of Natural History (www.amnh.org), in collaboration with the following institutions to which the exhibition will travel after it closes in New York: The Franklin Institute, Philadelphia; the Museum of Science, Boston; The Field Museum, Chicago; the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, Canada; and The Natural History Museum, London, England.

Admission

Timed tickets to Darwin, which include Museum admission, are $21.00 for adults, $16.00 for students and seniors, and $12.00 for children. Tickets can be reserved in advance by calling 212-769-5200 or visiting www.amnh.org.

Hours

The Museum is open daily, 10:00 a.m.–5:45 p.m.

The Rose Center remains open on Friday until 8:45 p.m.

The Museum is closed Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Public Information

For additional information, the public may call 212-769-5100 or visit the Museum’s Web site at www.amnh.org

The Darwin Exhibition

Three years in the making, the Darwin Exhibition celebrates the life and work of the Charles Robert Darwin in 6000 square feet packed with Darwin’s personal belongings (including his geological hammer from the Beagle, and his walking stick from his life at Down House—and much more!). We have many of his most critical letters, notebooks and manuscripts as we trace the development of his evolutionary ideas. We show many of the specimens he collected while on the Beagle, augmented with additional specimens from the American Museum and other collections—as we reveal the three clues that led Darwin to evolution while serving as ship’s naturalist on the Beagle. We explore Darwin’s work on artificial selection (pigeon breeding) and his work as an experimental botanist—and recreate in minute detail the study in which he wrote On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man. The exhibition concludes with an exploration of modern evolutionary biology—and the importance of evolution to understanding how infectious disease-causing organisms keep changing as we attempt to control their spread.

I am the Curator of the exhibition—responsible for the overall scientific and historical content. I had the help of many others, however—especially historian and noted Darwin scholar Dr. David Kohn, and Dr. Douglas Futuyma, author of the leading modern textbook on evolution.

The exhibition Darwin will be at the American Museum of Natural History in New York until May 29, 2006. It then travels to Boston (Museum of Science), Chicago (Field Museum of Natural History), Toronto (Royal Ontario Museum) and London (Natural History Museum). The exhibition arrives in London in late 2008—in time for the February 12, 2009 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth.

For more on the exhibition, please visit The Darwin Blogs on this website and the American Museum of Natural History.

Darwin. Discovering the Tree of Life is the companion book to the exhibition Darwin. Many of the objects on display on the exhibition are to be found among the 100 illustrations in this book.

After a brief look at the main biographical points of Darwin’s life, I zero in on his scientific training and the intellectual milieu in which Darwin grew up. I then “do a Darwin”—exploring his notes from the Beagle, the Red and Transmutation Notebooks of the late 1830s (where Darwin develops nearly all the elements of his theory of evolution through natural selection), continuing on through his 1842 Sketch, his 1844 Essay, his unfinished “Big Book” on Natural Selection, and On the origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection. I then explore the history of evolutionary thinking since Darwin—organizing the analysis around the themes that Darwin emphasized—and those which he chose to minimize or ignore completely. The book ends with a discussion of “intelligent design”—exposing it as just another, not particularly new, version of creationism.