New York Times | Darwin‘s Idea

Enough to Make an Iguana Turn Green: Darwin's Ideas
ByEDWARD ROTHSTEIN
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 It is handsomely populated with animals (even live ones), orchids, fossils, films, interactive video screens and historical documents and objects, some on loan from Down House, Darwin's longtime home in England; the Natural History Museum in London (which will present the exhibition in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.