Thanks very much to Rowan Adams, who gives us her view of the new Darwin Exhibition which is on tour at the Ventnor Botanic Gardens. Ed
Fancy something educational and worthy? Or would you prefer fun and silly?
Or thought-provoking and stimulating? Ventnor Botanic Garden are hosting an exhibition which offers all of the above.
Head down to the Canna Room in the Visitor Centre and you’ll find that the Darwin Today exhibition tour has reached the Island this month.
It’s a small exhibition, and there’s no way that it can do justice to all of Darwin’s work, let alone all that has happened since his insights revolutionised and made sense of biology.
The focus is on natural selection, which is fair enough in this anniversary year, 150 years since the Origin of Species was published.
So there isn’t anything on any of Darwin’s many other contributions to biology, or on the rest of his life.
More disappointing though is that there isn’t an extensive display on all the evidence and logical reasoning which led Darwin to his breakthrough idea, which is a pity since his arguments were unbelievably thorough, subtle and fascinating. (Though you can read the Origin of Species and all of Darwin’s work online)
Worse still – and something I’m sure Darwin would have felt was wrong – there’s no mention of Alfred Russel Wallace who had the same sudden insight that comes to a prepared mind, and realized that survival of the fittest would cause species to change.
Other people will probably disagree with me, but I was also depressed by the ‘Evolving society’ section which says that ‘Leader-follower relationships almost always emerge when groups of people interact…’
I’m not saying that Darwin didn’t have some conservative views – he did – but he also had many radical ones (and Wallace was almost entirely radical!).
But by including only this one attempt to apply the insights of natural selection to society, the Darwin Today exhibition implies that Darwin was an apologist for inequality – which is ironic in the year that Adrian Desmond and James Moore’s book ‘Darwin’s Sacred Cause: Race, Slavery and the Quest for Human Origins’ was published.
They convincingly argue that Darwin’s ‘sacred cause’, his commitment to the abolition of slavery, included at its core a belief in human racial unity, and that this motivated him to research the common origin not just of all human beings but of all life.
However, despite these few reservations about this exhibition, I can still highly recommend it. The displays, and the excellent set of five A4 handouts to go with them, are admirably clear and succinct.
There are interactive computer games, including one in which you try to behave like a successful plant, choosing how many leaves and roots to grow, how many leaves to open, when to grow flowers… get it wrong, and you’re declared extinct.
I played for about half an hour, and intend to go back to beat my own personal plant best.
Hooray yet again for Ventnor Botanic Garden for hosting ‘Darwin Today’.
The exhibition is on from 10 till 5 every day until 31 August.
More Darwin-related events are listed in the Council’s summer walks leaflet (PDF).
And now that I’ve written all the serious stuff, I have to fess up.
The best bit of the Darwin Today exhibition, from my five-year-old-trapped-in-a-50-year-old’s-body perspective, is the computer game which lets you create your own monster. Choose different eyes, ears, nose and mouth, and then ‘Press to release into the WILD!’
