Enough to Make an Iguana Turn Green: Darwin's Ideas
By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
November 18, 2005
http://tinyurl.com/8lg39
DURING the years in which Charles Darwin was working on his revolutionary
book, "On the Origin of Species," and later, with more intensity, in the
1860's, when controversy raged over his ideas, the naturalist was plagued
with bouts of gastric trauma, sometimes accompanied by severe eczema. The
illness was never diagnosed, and various hypotheses about a tropical
parasite, picked up during Darwin's five years traversing the world
aboard the HMS Beagle, have not been widely accepted.
At the very least, though, one could guess from Darwin's suffering the
toll it took to spend more than 20 years scrutinizing specimens of bone,
feather and leaf, meticulously chronicling habitats and behaviors and
creating a theory that tried to explain the entire development of the
animal and plant kingdoms. That theory has become so familiar, it is easy
to forget how bizarre and shocking it really is; it still inspires some
with outrage and disbelief.
The strangeness of that theory also does not really emerge in the
sweeping new exhibition devoted to Darwin's life and ideas at the
American Museum of Natural History (which opens tomorrow and will be on
view until May 29, before traveling to science museums in Boston,
Chicago, Toronto and London). Instead, this show, with almost too much
propriety, makes Darwin's theory of evolution seem - well, almost
natural. That is both a virtue and a flaw: the theory becomes clear but
not its revolutionary character. The exhibition is billed as the
"broadest and most complete collection ever assembled of specimens,
artifacts, original manuscripts and memorabilia related to Darwin." By
the time one works through it, it has so successfully given a sense of
the theory's explanatory power that the exhibition can seem too small for
its subject rather than too large. But it should be seen.
Curated by Niles Eldredge, a Darwin scholar and curator of the museum's
division of paleontology, the exhibition offers a habitat of Darwiniana.
It is handsomely populated with animals (even live ones), orchids,
fossils, films, interactive video screens and historical documents and
objects, some on loan from Down House, Darwin's longtime home in England;
the Natural History Museum in London (which will present the exhibition
in 2008-9); and Cambridge University Library. And for the most part, the
elements cohabit in extraordinary harmony, recounting the course of a
life and the evolution of its ideas.
Two live Galápagos tortoises, each weighing nearly 50 pounds, welcome the
viewers into the exhibition, which also includes live Argentinian horned
frogs and a green iguana - all displayed in glass-enclosed habitats
resembling the ones Darwin believed led to the animals' distinctive
coloring and character. There is a cartoon a classmate drew of the
aspiring naturalist mounted on a giant beetle waving a butterfly net; a
letter to his father in which Darwin, at age 22, pleaded to be allowed to
join the crew of the Beagle as the ship's naturalist; and scanned images
of Darwin's herbarium sheets showing leaves and stems collected during
that voyage. Notebooks in which Darwin's ideas about evolution began to
coalesce are here, as is - in a sure sign of canonization - a replica of
Darwin's studio, complete with his walking stick and microscope.
But the exhibition actually domesticates Darwin and his theory. Think,
instead, of the theory's daring. Darwin was asserting that over the
course of millenniums, miraculous bodily organs have taken shape out of
prehistoric crudities, species have changed their characters and turned
into completely different creatures, and human beings have come into
existence, all because of accidental events and the brute forces of
nature. Chance, in league with danger, created both the eye and the
orchid, the ocelot and the man. Now imagine asserting these ideas when no
one knew anything about genetic inheritance or mutation. Darwin's
digestive discomfort makes sense; in a way, so do contemporary
discomforts with his work.
In an 1844 letter on display, Darwin said that beginning to write about
his ideas was "like confessing a murder." He did not publish them for
well over a decade, until he was spurred by the prospect of competition,
when a young novice naturalist, Alfred Russel Wallace, sent Darwin a
letter that eerily echoed some of his long-gestating ideas. After
generously sharing some credit and helping to arrange for simultaneous
publication of their primary ideas in 1858, Darwin set to work on his
magnum opus, "On the Origin of Species."
In its sheer accumulation of objects and displays, the exhibition gives a
sense of the wealth of information and experience Darwin himself had to
sift through. It is shaped chronologically, as a journey through Darwin's
life, punctuated with clear texts that highlight the connection between
the objects on display and the ideas taking shape. The voyage on the
Beagle, for example, offered a panorama of the natural world, through
which Darwin peered, prodding, probing, describing everything he saw. Why
did some extinct species seem to resemble those that took their place?
Why did similar environments sometimes include very different species?
What relationship was there between a place and the animals that lived
there?
The Galápagos Islands presented a kind of astounding laboratory.
Creatures on one island developed isolated from those on another, the
accidents of habitat somehow producing birds and tortoises with different
colorations or shapes. Darwin surmised that such variation developed out
of common ancestry, an idea that would, he said, "undermine the stability
of Species," challenging the notion that species possessed eternal
stability.
Darwin was indefatigable, obsessed and all too aware that his ideas were
cutting close to the spiritual and cultural home that had been
constructed by religious belief. His wife, Emma, worried that the Darwins
might not, given their different religious perspectives, be spending
eternity in the same place; Charles shed tears over their differences.
But he also instructed Emma in another document, that if he were to die
before finishing his work, 500 pounds could be set aside from his estate
to ensure its compilation and continuation.
Both worlds were shaken when Annie, one of the 10 children they were to
have, died when she was 10. A writing box, preserved by her parents, is
filled with the girl's treasures; instead of fossils and beetles, there
are neatly wound embroidery thread, a quill pen, and - added later - her
father's chart chronicling her tuberculosis and a drawn map of her grave.
Darwin was shattered by the death of his "poor, dear, dear child," though
in his universe, death had a very different meaning than it did in
Emma's. But he must have hung on to aspects of her world. The term,
"natural selection," after all, almost personifies nature, as if there
were some force selectively working toward an end. The terminology had a
religious cast, as Darwin well knew, but the implications of his ideas,
as his illness attests, were far more unsettling.
The exhibition, in fact, falls short in not showing just how provocative
and revolutionary Darwin's theory is. The introductory section, about the
world before Darwin, shows an astonishing collection of skeletons from
the museum's collection in a curiosity cabinet that displays each species
with its own set of bones and shape - a collection of representative
models. A counterpart reflecting Darwin's theory could have also been
shown, reordering the creatures, or perhaps a Darwinian "tree" could have
displayed the species branching out from each other as they evolved.
The theory is also made to seem too invulnerable, particularly toward the
exhibition's end, where recent views about evolution are surveyed and
recent evidence for the theory presented.
Perhaps in reaction to the various attempts to get notions of
"intelligent design" taken seriously in science classrooms the exhibition
ends up minimizing scientific questions about the theory as well. "For
150 years," the wall text states, "the theory of evolution by natural
selection has not been seriously challenged by any other scientific
explanation."
But the point would have been even stronger had the museum acknowledged
that Darwin's theory has indeed been subject to scientific modification,
and still is. The exhibition does not draw attention to these issues,
though Mr. Eldredge's own biography on the museum's Web site points out
that he was one of the scientists (including Stephen Jay Gould)
"challenging Darwin's premise that evolution occurs gradually," asserting
instead that it occurs in spurts with long periods of stasis. Doesn't
this modify the idea of the "survival of the fittest" in an important
way? It would have been worth pointing out, too, why this modification
was proposed: the fossil record doesn't provide the plentiful examples of
continuous evolution that Darwin's theory predicts.
If examples like that - about the evolution of Evolution - had been
included with more discussion, one of the crucial aspects of a scientific
theory would have been illustrated: that it is subject to change and
modification, that the pressures of ever-increasing knowledge have the
power to kill off some ideas while permitting others to flourish. Such a
theory is continually evolving, rather than eternally comforting - which
can itself induce vertigo.
"Darwin" opens tomorrow at the American Museum of Natural History,
Central Park West and 79th Street; (212) 769-5100. It runs through May
29.
--
Enkidu AA#2165
EAC Chaplain and ordained minister,
ULC, Modesto, CA
PGP ID: 0xC4CE8CF0
The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so
certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts.
-- Bertrand Russell
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