Exhibition celebrates science of Darwin

It may seem that the American Museum of Natural History is cruising for controversy in presenting "Darwin," the most comprehensive exhibition any museum has offered on the naturalist's life and theories.

It is a time, after all, when the theory of evolution by natural selection seems as newsworthy as it was back in the days of the Scopes trial 80 years ago. According to a CBS News poll last month, 51 percent of Americans reject the theory of evolution, saying that God created humans in their present form. But Ellen Futter, president of the museum, said the $3 million exhibition, which opens to the public Nov. 19, was conceived three years ago and "is not a riposte, but a celebration of Darwin's life and his ideas, which are the cornerstone of modern biology."

The exhibition illustrates the way in which evolution became the basis for modern biology, ranking its importance with the theories of relativity in physics and plate tectonics in geology.

"Since Darwin's life is an adventure story that reflects the scientific process," Futter added, "the show is a cerebral and physical exploration, an attempt to humanize science through an understanding of Darwin's life."

The exhibition will consist of more than 400 artifacts, specimens and documents, including at least 100 manuscripts on loan, 159 models fabricated by the museum's workshops, 74 specimens from the museum's collections and 9 live animals. Though created and designed at the museum, the show received conceptual advice and financial assistance from four institutions that will present the exhibition after it closes in New York on May 29: the Museum of Science in Boston, the Field Museum in Chicago, the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto and the Natural History Museum in London.

"We see the exhibition as an important part of our Darwin bicentennial," said Robert Bloomfield, head of special projects at the Natural History Museum in London. The show will arrive there in late 2008, "a harbinger of our celebrations" marking the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth in 2009, which is also the 150th anniversary of the publication of his groundbreaking book "On the Origin of Species."

Michael Novacek, senior vice president and provost of the American Museum of Natural History, said that "our hope is to make it emphatically clear just how important Darwin's work is to modern science and to what we and other scientists do in everyday life."

None of the staff members believe in intelligent design "or at least they haven't declared it," he said. "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution." He added, "Some of the current reactions to Darwin's work are the same as they were when 'Origin' was first published."

The exhibition mentions intelligent design not as science, or as a theory to be debated, but as a form of creationism, which offers the biblical view that God created the earth and its creatures fully formed within the last 10,000 years. In 1987 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that creationism is a religious belief that cannot be taught in public schools.

Novacek said that "we are welcoming everyone to the show," adding that "we will be prepared to respond to questions." The museum's docents and staff members are being trained on ways to answer challenges to the exhibition.

Niles Eldredge, the exhibition's curator, said, "We might change some minds."

But Novacek added: "We respect people's beliefs, and conversion is not necessarily our goal. We hope that every visitor will have a clearer idea of what Darwin did and, for that matter, what science means."

The show is one of the museum's series on thinkers, explorers and scientists, following exhibitions on Leonardo da Vinci and Albert Einstein. The Darwin exhibition has been assembled not only from the museum's collections but also from those of Cambridge University, the Darwin family and Down House, where the naturalist spent the last 40 years of his life.

The exhibition is presented as a chronological journey to South America and the Galapagos Islands and also as an internal journey that changed the way Darwin viewed the world and himself. "We'd like visitors to follow Darwin's life, to see what he saw, and understand how he came to his ideas," Eldredge said.

The exhibition "has the crown jewels," Novacek said, referring to Darwin's original specimens, manuscripts and notes. "Many of these haven't been together since they were on the HMS Beagle," he said, referring to the ship that carried Darwin on a voyage from 1831 to 1836 to South America and the Galapagos.

The show will offer an overview of human evolution through the rich fossil record. It will also demonstrate how Darwin's work gave rise to modern biology with displays on genomic research, DNA research and evidence of the latest update of the taxonomic tree of life.

Also on view will be some of Darwin's most famous notebooks, written from 1837 to 1839, especially Page 36 in Notebook B, where he sketched the world's first evolutionary tree of life. "That's the equivalent of seeing E=mc2 in Einstein's papers," Eldredge said.

The museum also offers a meticulous re-creation of the room at Down House where Darwin wrote "Origin," presenting his original cane, work table and specimen boxes.

The significance of Darwin's ideas "has grown," Bloomfield said. "For example, at this moment we're looking at Asian bird flu and where it's going. If not for Darwinism, we would be ignorant of the mechanism of that flu and how it changes over time."

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