The Toronto Star Reviews "Darwin: The Evolution Revolution"

 
Darwin: The Evolution Revolution is currently on at the Royal Ontario Museum (until August 4, 2008). There was a review of the exhibit by Peter Calamai in yesterday's Toronto Star [Darwin still battling creationists]. It seems like an excellent review. I haven't yet seen the exhibit so I can't comment on the details but everything that Peter Calamai says rings true.

One of the criticisms of the exhibit is that there are too many things to read. Calamai estimates that it would take five hours to read all the explanatory panels. Another criticism is that the written information tilts heavily toward defending Darwin's ideas, and that sometimes this zeal trumps the truth ...

For make no mistake about it, parts of "Darwin: The Evolution Revolution" are an exercise in anti-creationist persuasion, usually subtle but often blatant.

Take this statement from a panel headed "Creationism" at the close of the exhibit:

"For 150 years since the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species, the theory of evolution by natural selection has not been seriously challenged by any other scientific explanation."

The weasel word here is "seriously," since that's very much a qualitative judgment. Yet, even setting Creationism aside, well-respected historians of science such as Peter Bowler (The Non-Darwinian Revolution) have maintained that alternate scientific theories of evolution, such as mutation and Lamarckism, were resolutely championed by mainstream scientists until after World War I.

Evolution through the mechanism of natural selection, the core of Darwin's approach, was simply not a "slam-dunk" scientific revolution after On the Origin of Species was published in 1859, as the ROM exhibit repeatedly implies.

Yet Darwin's thesis is widely accepted by today's scientific community. So why all the defensive proselytizing, as though his ideas were under siege?

Calamai makes a good point. The statement on the exhibit is clearly incorrect and that's embarrassing.

Why is there such an emphasis on defending Darwin when such a defense is serious overkill in Canada?

Because they are – at least in the United States, where this "show-in-a-box" originates. ROM officials acknowledge that they had minimal input on the thematic level to the travelling exhibit from the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

Where evolution is concerned, a chasm yawns between the U.S. and Canada. Polling by Angus Reid published two years ago found that one in five Canadians surveyed agreed with the statement that God created human beings in their present form within the last 10,000 years. Nearly half the Americans surveyed chose this option.

The resulting anti-creationist mindset, while at times annoying, cannot ruin an exhibit that will reward multiple visits at several different levels.

Finally, I'm glad that Peter Calamai closed his article by mentioning the problem of funding.

Perhaps we haven't progressed as far from such times as we'd like to believe. The Darwin exhibit opened without an outside sponsor, although several groups have since rallied to the cause, including the Humanist Association of Canada.

But there's still no major corporate sponsor. They're all too spooked by the prospect of the one-in-five minority of Canadians who believe – despite an Everest of evidence to the contrary – that human beings sprang upon the Earth in their current form a mere 10,000 years ago.

I know the members of the Humanist group who put up the money. Thank God goodness we have some wealthy atheists in town! But that's no excuse for the cowardly behavior of the usual sponsors. Where are the SikKids Foundation, The Gairdiner Foundation, the University of Toronto, and the leading biotech companies in Toronto?

Is it true that some of these potential sponsors have declined because evolution is too controversial? Yes, in some cases that's true. There are members of the Gairdiner family, for example, who have doubts about evolution.

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