Darwin (review)

After its stay at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, this major exhibition on Charles Darwin was scheduled to travel to Boston, Chicago, and Toronto before ending up at the British Museum (Natural History) in London in time for the bicentenary of Darwin's birth in 2009. It is a very welcome event, for evolution is under much pressure in America at the moment. No less a person than the president of the United States, George W. Bush, has agreed that in the nation's biology classes we should "teach the issues"—weasel language for allowing Intelligent Design Theory equal billing with Darwinian evolutionary theory. I am glad to say that when I went around the exhibition before Christmas it was crowded, and I understand that over the break there was so much interest that people were being turned away. It is good to know that there is this much public support for one of the greatest ideas of all time.

The exhibition itself is comprehensive. The Beagle voyage gets full billing, as does the route to evolution and then on to natural selection. Many years ago when I first started working on Charles Darwin, one could go to the University Library in Cambridge and actually handle the precious notebooks in which Darwin recorded his creative thinking processes. Now we all use transcriptions (which I rush to say are very good)—but the thrill of actually holding the real things in your hands is gone. In this exhibition you can look and wonder at those very notebooks, being brought close to the young English naturalist who worked his way through to the solutions to the origins of organisms.

I understand that the Museum found it difficult to obtain sponsors, evolution being such a dangerous position. This is disgraceful, although not entirely surprising. Perhaps, however, restricted funding accounts for the rather old-fashioned air of the exhibit, which is primarily a matter of looking at things under glass. It is true that there are some real-life tortoises at the entrance, but then it is all a bit downhill. I remember at the Science Museum in Barcelona being whisked right into a rain forest—birds, light and dark, downpours of rain, and more. How wonderful it would have been to have had this to give us an idea of Darwin's experiences. Also, the Beagle itself is disappointingly represented by a model, as if from a kit. When I was a child, one of the department stores had a "train" taking you to see Santa: you got in at one end, the door was shut, the carriage started to rock, and the landscape flew by on the way to the North Pole, and then you got out at the other end, slightly sick but very happy. Of course it was all a mock-up—but why not a mock-up of the Beagle, showing how very small it was and how Darwin's seasickness was very understandable? Why not a few sailors being flogged? (If no actors could be found for the role, I would have been happy to volunteer some of my graduate students.)

What is most wrong with the exhibition, however, is the way that Darwin is sanitized. It seems that either he must be an ogre or he must be a saint. The exhibition clearly states that although some naughty people got into the way of using evolution to promote social causes—so-called social Darwinism—thank God the master himself never did this. To which I can only say that whoever set up this exhibition has obviously never read the Descent of Man. I do not say that Darwin was a bad man: he was a good husband and father, he was a good master, his chums loved him, he was against slavery. But his views on women, on blacks, on the poor, were—shall we be euphemistic?—very conventional...