My father-in-law is in town, and so I tried to take him to the Darwin exhibit. We couldn't get in in a timely fashion, so we went to the new MoMA instead. What a great decision that was: the new building is a perfect setting for modern sensibilities and the collection has so many fascinating places to stop and gawk. Recommended.

My favorite item was the Bell helicopter:

One of the ideas that inspired Charles Darwin was selective breeding, the process by which dogs or horses are tailored over generations to excel at, and instinctively perform, a specific task. I was thinking about this today when I took Sam to Prospect Park to run after a tennis ball. Sam will run after a tennis ball with every fiber of his being. I'm pretty sure he doesn't think about why, or whether it's a good idea, or anything else for that matter - when the tennis ball flies, he runs and gets it, and brings it back, and that's all there is to it, and he enjoys the experience so much you can actually tell that a lot of his time in between chasing tennis balls is spent hoping that he's about to do it some more. It's a gift, and he knows it's what he's born to do.

I, on the other hand, have had some major difficulty finding my "purpose in life" - I have no idea what color my parachute is, despite a lot of attention to that question. Sam and I fill out each other's profiles really well - he knows exactly what he likes to do, but he has no opposable thumbs and almost no understanding of mathematics as far as I can tell. I, on the other hand, am a math teacher for crying out loud, and the good lord has blessed me with two thumbs and a tendency towards self-second-guessing. He really likes to be petted and I really like petting him. We both get a lot out of the deal, but I have to admit, I'm very jealous of his keen sense of self.

A colleague of mine arranged for all of the teachers at my school to visit the Charles Darwin exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History and I found the experience very rich.

Like everyone else, I followed the news from Kansas last year about their school board's mandating the teaching of Intelligent Design as science, a folly which cost those board members their jobs. The exhibit at the AMNH explicitly counters the arguments of ID proponents and does so in a very low-key, but forceful way. The result is that the work of Darwin is solidly linked to our circumstances in the present.

However, I was most affected by the ways in which the AMNH exhibit linked Darwin's breakthroughs to the circumstances of his time and his intellectual climate, in particular, the family in which he grew up. I learned that he was the grandson of Erasmus, a man who had already thought a bit about evolution, and the son of Robert, a man who was vehemently opposed to Charles' becoming a scientist. But Robert was not so firm in his resolve that a logical argument would not change his mind, and Charles' uncle was able to provide this key support.

As I learned more about the tenor of the times, I found one key detail fascinating: Darwin was influenced in an important way by the emerging understanding of geology which was a nascent science at that time. He came to understand that there was geological evidence that age of the earth was far greater than had been previously assumed. Adopting this new time scale made it conceivable that species could have evolved over miliions of years and many thousands of generations.

I like this connection because it reminds me that there are unpredictable links between the sciences and that a great mind can synthesize from a variety of sources.

Another way the exhibit contextualized Darwin's work was in making it clear just how far the theory of evolution diverged from accepted science of the times and how much Darwin risked in making it public. He was immediately subjected to arguments and controversy that would not seem the least bit unfamiliar to followers of the Kansas case upon its publication. Darwin was worried by both this firestorm and the risk of shocking his wife's personal beliefs and for this reason delayed publication for decades.

Finally, the most impressive thing about the exhibit was how it showed they way Darwin;s mind worked. Using very simple tools and very little in the way of resources, he essentially leveraged his opportunity to be in a fruitful place (the good ship Beagle) at a fruitful time (the 1830's) by virtue of being able to make the most of every scrap of information he learned and every observation he made. I can't think of an intellectual effort that extrapolated so well, so far, as Darwin's.

In sum, the exhibit presents Darwin the man, Darwin the family member, Darwin the thinker, as well as Darwin the theorist. It makes use of a well-chosen variety of displays, from living animals to model boats and preserved insects, to explain and illuminate. I'm going back later this week to see it again.

As you can see by examining my postings, I am not one of those bloggers who updates every day, or even every month. Maybe I just don't have quite that much to say! Or maybe evolution is just slow . . . .