The Charles Darwin exhibition at New York's American Museum of Natural History is full of bones, books, and-antiquated scientific instruments. But mostly, on any given day, it's full of noisy schooléchildren. The cacophony can make it difficult to meditate on Darwin's still-écontroversial theory, but that doesn't seem to bother Edward O. Wilson, the famed Harvard evolutionary biologist.
Wilson is making his first visit to the exhibition, but his attention is currently monopolized by Isabelle Blank, a ponytailed young girl in pink polka-dot pants who is accompanied by her father.
"How old are you?" Wilson asks her.
"Um, 9," she replies.
"Almost 9," her father corrects.
"Oh, that's a wonderful age. I got started on butterflies. I call it the Bug Period. Growing up in Alabama, my friends called me 'Bugs' Wilson."
Now 76, Wilson has lost none of his zeal for winged insects and all things creepy-crawly. Peering into a glass case full of beetles, he says excitedly, "I believe these are specimens actually collected by Darwin." With his tweed jacket and mussed gray hair, he could be mistaken for an overly enthusiastic docent - albeit one whose career includes two Pulitzers and the establishment of at least one scientific discipline, sociobiology.
Wilson has more than a passing interest in the exhibition. He edited, annotated, and wrote introductory essays for an anthology of Darwin's writings, From So Simple a Beginning: Darwin's Four Great Books, published last fall. The timing of the show and Wilson's book were not intended to counter the rise of the intelligent-design movement, but the author is enjoying the coincidence. "I'm delighted - and so is my publisher," Wilson laughs. In September, he will address the neo-creationists directly in a book aimed at a hypothetical Southern Baptist pastor. Evolution will prevail, Wilson predicts: "As someone said recently, 'We've got the fossils. We win.'"
Wilson rounds a corner to find a few of the animals that led Darwin to conclude that the ultimate designers are nature and chance. "Here we are at the rheas," Wilson says with satisfaction as he examines two flightless birds on display. The smaller one is actually a distinct species, Darwin realized. "That's now known as Darwin's rhea, and it lived about 1,000 kilometers south of the larger variety."
Just as geography could create variation, Darwin began to see, so too could the passage of time. Wilson points to the skeleton of an armadillo-like creature about the size of a small pony. "That's a glyptodont. This was one of the extinct forms that planted a second seed in Darwin's mind," he says. "In Darwin's day, conventional wisdom held that extinct species hadn't made it onto Noah's ark. Darwin looked at the similarity between forms, like the glyptodont and the modern armadillo, and wondered why God would trouble replacing one species with another so similar."
Inside another vitrine, an inconéspicuous object catches Wilson's eye. A pocket-size notebook has been left open to a page on which I think is scrawled above a rudimentary sketch of what looks like a tree. "It's the tree of evolution, 1837," he says in a hushed voice. A guard gruffly asks him to take a step back. "I can see why she's worried," he says. "In the history of science, this is like the Declaration of Independence." Two years after Darwin's return from his voyage on the HMS Beagle, his inchoate obserévations had begun to take shape. But so anxious was Darwin to avoid the controversy he knew his ideas would create that he spent another 21 years refining them. Questioning creationism, he wrote in 1844, was like "confessing a murder."
At the exhibition exit, an inscription is emblazoned on a wall. "This is where Iégot the title for my book," he says softly, then reads aloud: "There is grandeur in this view of life from so simple a beginning, endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved." Darwin, he notes, "didn't take many poetic flights, but when he did, they were beauties."
- Jeff Howe
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The Origin of Darwin
