Darwins
Ghost: The Darwin Exhibit at the American
Museum of Natural History
New York, New York; November 19, 2005August
20, 2006
Reviewed by Jonathan Zilberg
Monash College
Jakarta
jonathanzilberg@yahoo.com
Currently, in the Museum of Natural History
in New York, there is the shownot
merely of the century, but of two. In
a sophisticated and accessible, even moving
manner, the exhibition "Darwin"
walks one through the story of the discovery
of evolution and how it has become the
guiding principle of modern biology. The
exhibition is a temple of information
and history showing how Darwinism has
not only survived but thrived. It recapitulates
how evolution has evolved from a theory
based on meticulous science and an enormous
body of evidence and experimentation to
a scientific fact far beyond any reasonable
doubt. Indeed, this show, and the marvelous
accompanying book by the curator Niles
Eldredge, Darwin: Discovering the
Tree of Life (2005), will act as the
bedrock upon which the current "controversy"
and the new pseudo-scientific doctrine
of intelligent design will become better
understood for what it isa
highly evolved living medieval fossil.
ID aside, if careful, you will happen
upon a jewel, the very ruby of evolutions
conceptual historyone page
from the 1837 B notebook, the first of
a series of notebooks on "transmutation".
It is an ancient symbol that now indelibly
marks our time and evolutionary science.
The page begins with the two words "I
think" and below this affirmation,
of sorts, Darwin sketched out a tree-like
diagram that crystallized his idea of
how species evolve from common ancestors.
This model has formed the template for
the creation of a whole galaxy of work
with which we are so familiar today.
For example, in the permanent dinosaur
exhibit nearby on the same floor, there
is a fantastically complex tree of life
depicting the speciation of the dinosaurs.
Darwins ghost mingles there with
the people sitting in the pew-like rows
of seats. Together they are viewing a
simple film that allows us to contemplate
the nature of evolutionthe
structural and molecular similarities
and differences between mollusks and men,
shrews and pachiderms, and hominids and
hominoids. Darwins ghost is glowing
with wonder and joy at what the fossil
record and scientific investigation has
revealed since his time. We sit there
amazed at the vastness of time, of the
worlds gone by in which major branches
of beings split off from each other based
on key anatomical transmutations, such
as the sudden emergence of the hip socketto
say nothing of the very recent alteration
of that socket that allowed Adam and Eve
to walk rather than crawl away from the
Garden of Eden.
In our time, the grandeur of Darwins
view is expanding like a supernova in
the spectacle of the double helix in action,
with genes tripping, zipping, and unzipping,
in their being spliced and cloned and
all the wonders that are to come and all
the healing that is to be doneshould
science continue to win the day. In fact,
a new day is dawning for Darwins
notions of phylogeny and ontogeny. While
his favored, if lesser-known, descendants,
developmental zoologists and embryologists,
have long since revealed the intimate
life stories of embryonic development
that so fascinated hima whole
field of investigationthe
shock of the new is upon us.
Though the wondrous story of the simple
blastula and dividing and in-folding cell
lines developing in concert into nervous
and epithelial tissue and the related
mystery of flesh and bone and blood and
feeling (if not spirit) all coming together
was amazing, evolutionary biologists using
molecular biochemistry are bringing to
light the existence of switches that regulate
the expression of genes. Now we can account
for the mystery of mysteriesthe
sudden and dramatic changes in life forms,
such as the changes in the insect world
from six legs to eight, and at last, the
explanation for the long-pondered connection
between the simians tail and the
human coccyx, and so much else. Darwins
ghost is delighted, for Evo-Devo is upon
us.
Of all the momentous developments in biological
knowledge in the twentieth century, none
is more sexy, more exciting, than the
recently emerging field of Evo-Devoevolutionary
developmental biology. Herein, scientists
have isolated "tool kits" of
bodybuilding genes as Sean Carroll so
eloquently describes in his fabulous article,
"The Origins of Form," in last
years November issue of Natural
History. We now know how the same
Pax-6 gene functions in the formation
of eyes whether it be in the case of fruit
flies or human beings, how Hox genes
govern the changes and repetitions of
body parts in both arthropods and vertebrates,
and most amazing of allhow
another set of body building genes determines
both the shape of birds beaks and
the human face. But let us return respectfully
to Darwin.
As you leave the exhibit, you pass through
a darkened cloaca-like gallery festooned
with Asian orchids tastefully displayed
under incandescent lights. And there,
a calm almost religious white male voice
continually repeats the closing lines
of the first edition of The Origin
of the Species, that is, before Darwin
added in those two telling words "the
Creator" in the second editionand
before he added in the laws themselves
in subsequent editions, thus ruining the
lingering poetic aura of the original.
Regardless of this concession, it is exceedingly
unlikely that you will leave unmoved by
the last spoken line of the original passage
that reads:
". . . There
is grandeur to this view of life,
with its several powers, having been
originally breathed into a few forms
or into one; and that, whilst this
planet has gone cycling on according
to the fixed laws of gravity, from
so simple a beginning endless forms
most beautiful and most wonderful
have been, and are being evolved."
(1872 Sixth ed. p. 492)
What more can one
say, then, to recall Wallaces little
known publication of 1884 "If a Man
Should Die, Shall He Live Again?"
and end at last with these words of love
for Darwins excited GhostRest
in PeaceDear Darwin.