Darwin Exhibit: AMNH

Well, after many weeks I finally got the gumption to check out the Darwin exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History. I've been wanting to do this since the widely lauded exhibit opened back in November, but was waiting for, well I don't know, a good excuse. And what better excuse, I finally decided than a major New York snowstorm that shrouded the city beneath some 26 inches of white stuff. Brutal, to be sure. But an even better reason to finally catch the exhibit, I decided, was that yesterday was the birthday of Charles Darwin. Yes, the great founder of evolutionary theory would have been 197 years old yesterday, and I have to say I wonder what he would have thought about the exhibit, not to mention his place in history.

Seriously, as I wandered through this wonderful exhibit, (which has a very satisfactory online component) the one thing that keep occurring to me is how common-sensical so much of evolution is. Sure, there are deeper details to the theory that take a bit more noodle power to grasp, but the basic idea is really rather simple: species change over time, and their survival depends on their ability to adapt to environmental changes. The evidence for evolution has been around, well, forever, and it’s not like the entire human population was so blinded by religion that you couldn’t at least suspect that some kind of natural selection takes place among species. Fossils have been abundant in museums and in the collections of amateur collectors for years and years, so people knew that species once existed that are no longer alive.

Now, I know that Darwin did a great deal of research, collecting, thinking and writing and essentially formalized the theory of evolution. But we also know that at least a couple of people had pondered and written about the idea as well, chief among them Darwin’s granddaddy Erasmus and Alfred Russel Wallace, who might very well have beat Darwin to publish the theory if Darwin had dawdled any longer than he already had (some 20 years). Anyway, my point is that evolution seems to make so much sense, I wonder if Darwin..who was not apparently horribly arrogant, in fact he was rather modest…would have enjoyed all of this adulation, or whether he would have wanted to better share the “discovery” of the theory with many others rather than have the whole thing attributed to him, which seems to be the case if you follow the subject in the mainstream media. Now, yes, I am aware that the history of the theory is filled with other names and other thinkers who contributed immensely to its development, but we do sometimes seem to lay the whole shebang at his feet.

Well, back to the exhibit, which without question dispenses the credit for evolution more liberally. I enjoyed it immensely, even if I didn’t learn a great deal more than what I’ve already read in books on the subject. First and foremost among the attractions are the numerous notebooks and letters in the show penned by Darwin and those he corresponded with over the years. The exhibit is sensibly laid out to show the progression of Darwin’s ideas over time, the evolution, if you will, of his thinking. And I found the experience of staring down at his famous red notebooks to be exhilarating. I mean, here were the man’s ideas on paper, written by himself. That was truly amazing. The iguana and the giant Galapagos tortoise on display (alive, but not very active) were also a nice touch, but nothing in my mind compared to the various documents and tools (all very simple) that were on display.

So this is one of those events/shows that any fan of evolution will thoroughly enjoy, and I highly recommend it.

Filed under: History, Learning, Festivals and Events