At the heart of an extraordinary exhibition of Charles Darwin's work at the American Museum of Natural History is perhaps the greatest story ever old, writes Belinda McKeon in New York
There are many strange sights in the Darwin exhibition currently running at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. The skeletons of an orangutan, a domestic cat and a five-foot guboon viper mingling in a small glass case, along with those of other creatures from around the world. An artificial river habitat in which the brilliantly jewelled forms of four live specimens, ornate horned frogs from South America, crouch and hide and glare up at those who stop to look at them. An illustration of the Scalesia, a daisy which grew to the height of a tree on the Galápagos islands; a reconstruction of a giant armoured armadillo-like creature, the Glyptodont, as tall and as bulky as a pedigree bull. Wilted handfuls of long-dead mockingbirds and finches from the South Pacific, laid out in rows like little slaughtered families, and fossils of three-toed sloths from the same region, animals that had once grown to the size of elephants.
Huge shoulders of coral reef; the bulbous petals of orchid flowers, each specimen subtly different to the next; a diagram showing six million years of hominid evolution; a live iguana, plump as a pampered dog, stretched lazily across the branch of a tree in another glass case, its yellow-green scales shuddering like jowels with each breath, its long mouth seeming to beam in an expression of almost Buddhistic calm.
In the course of his five-year voyage onboard the Beagle, as he traversed the globe collecting fossils and specimens, probing the differences and resemblances between species, Charles Darwin, then in his early to mid twenties and a devout Christian, encountered what must have seemed like several worlds' worth of mysteries and marvels.
The greatest wonder of all was that they had all taken shape in the same world. Around every corner in the Museum of Natural History's superb exhibition, curated by Niles Eldredge, with an accompanying book, to mark the beginning of celebrations for the bicentenary of Charles Darwin's birth in 2009, are genuine marvels, both mammoth and microscopic.
YET COMPETING FOR attention alongside them are stranger specimens still; marvels of the more myopic variety.
"This textbook contains material on evolution," a sticker on a biology textbook issued to students in the state of Georgia reads.
"Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered."
Just over a year ago, a federal judge ruled that such stickers, which had been in use since 2002, were contrary to the US constitution's promise to separate church and state, and ordered that they be removed from the state's textbooks.
It's somewhat disheartening that, in his 240-page tribute to a 19th-century scientist who overturned humanity's vision of itself with the aid of a compass, a clinometer and "a case of good pistols" (as Darwin wrote to his family before setting out on the Beagle voyage in 1831), Eldredge should find himself obliged to devote so much space - a sixth of the book, in fact - to answering attacks on evolutionary theory, which have advanced in no recognisable way on the argument of William Paley.
Paley, writing seven years before Darwin was born, insisted in his book Natural Theology that, just as the workings of a watch were evidence of purposeful design by a watchmaker, complex living organisms were evidence of design by an intelligent Creator.
"What is Intelligent Design?" asks Eldredge, referring to the lastest incarnation of creationism ruling the scientific curricula of schools in the US bible belt and beyond. "Nothing but William Paley's Watchmaker born again."
PALEY, AND INDEED Darwin, lacked the knowledge revealed by the molecular revolution in biology, by genetic science, by giant leaps in the comprehension of DNA. For this reason, Eldredge yields, creationism was in its day quite a valid intellectual enterprise, "when the best minds in England (including the younger Darwin)" found creationist views "satisfying and intellectually compelling". But the modern manifestation, fuelled by wilful ignorance and conservatism, and matching stride for stride the advance of the political right, it can not be argued to be any such thing. Comparing biological with material and cultural evolutionary patterns and systems, Eldredge smoothly undermines the argument for Intelligent Design in his last chapter; though complex, the charts and cladograms (evolutionary trees) which he creates in support of his case make clear a simple truth. Advances made by means of a design system are more precisely viewed as overhauls rather than evolutions, as independent solutions to old problems rather than internal modifications and mutations. We should be forever thankful to Darwin, he writes, for giving us an argument that is more than just a hypothesis, but that is a theory - and a testable one.
Long before modern testing methods, however, Darwin's claims for evolution were already solidly backed by the reality of what he had found on his Bounty expedition. During his years poring through the rocks and grasses of islands in the southern hemisphere, Darwin crated and sent home to England shells, fossils and bone samples, which formed the jigaw pieces for an astonishing explication of natural selection and adaptation. He would put the jigsaw together on his return home, barely believing the evidence of his own eyes, and wary for a long time of confiding his rapidly coalescing theory of "transmutation" to anybody.
As the fragments of his notebooks yielded a picture of a huge family tree, with the most ancient forms at the bottom and their descendants branching off irregularly along the trunk, Darwin began to grasp the realisation towards which all of his fieldwork had been leading him: that all species were related through common ancestry and that, in response to needs and environment, they change over time.
'I THINK," HE wrote firmly over the first such tree he sketched, in a notebook from the late 1830s; the page, along with several other samples of Darwin's loping, exploratory scribblings, some from early drafts of his Origin of the Species, is on display in the New York exhibition. The fever in which it must have been drawn is palpable; the rapidly-forked branches seem almost to tremble on the page. It was Darwin's eureka. Letting others in on the secret, he would later write, was like "confessing a murder".
What comes across, both in the exhibition and in Eldredge's book, is the extraordinary care and caution with which Darwin developed his theory, even after he had demonstrated its validity to himself. His 1844 Essay on evolution was down on paper, but hidden away; he resisted publication for several years, preferring instead to work at his own pace and wait until he felt the theory was proven beyond all doubt. This also had the effect, of course, of avoiding the ridicule to which some contemporaries hypothesising about evolution had been exposed.
Ill health and family tragedy - the death of his 10-year-old daughter Annie, inquisitive like him and affectionate like her mother, had shattered both parents. Against his father's advice, Darwin had decided to come clean to his wife Emma about the growing religious doubts stirred up in his mind by his scientific discoveries; she had reacted with dismay, worrying most of all that they might not meet in the afterlife. As they grieved for their "poor, dear, dear child", public scrutiny of these implications of Darwin's life work would, understandably, have been an unwelcome prospect.
In the end, Darwin was jolted into publication by the announcement, in 1858, that a younger naturalist, Alfred Russel Watson had developed a theory of evolution by natural selection exactly like Darwin's own. Friends encouraged Darwin to publish quickly, and he decided himself to get his theory into print; within a year, his Origin of the Species appeared to shake the very foundations of the world.
"There is a grandeur in this view of life," he wrote at the close of that book. "From so simple a beginning, endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved."
Darwin's study, faithfully reproduced at the heart of this exhibition, which so memorably presents both the scientist and the man, is empty now, its shelves untouched, its instruments unneeded. But the wheels of his life's work continue to turn. In the last room of Darwin at the Natural History Museum, dozens of orchid plants grow and bloom. A small child runs past them without a second glance.
Darwin: Discovering the Tree of Life by Niles Eldredge is published by Norton $35 (€29.40) . See the American Museum of Natural History website: www.amnh.org/exhibitions/darwin
Darwin days: the story of natural selection
Darwin showed that populations adapt and evolve by means of a specific mechanism, for which the idea of "the survival of the fittest" has become shorthand.
The Darwin exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History breaks this down into five basic steps:
Variation Members of a species are seldom identical; as cells divide, mutations occur.
Inheritance When organisms reproduce, they pass on traits encoded in their DNA.
Selection Variations in genetic make-up can influence whether an organism survives.
Time Advantageous traits can spread to a whole population after some generations.
Adaptation The result is a population better suited to an environment than before.