Darwin and the Evolution of a Theory

This past week Miss C and I finally got to the wonderful exhibit at UC Berkeley on Darwin and evolution, just before it closed. We'd been trying to make it there all fall but this has been our busiest homeschooling year yet, and it hadn't been possible until now.

The exhibit, "Darwin and the Evolution of a Theory," at the Bancroft Library Gallery on campus, was part of this year's celebrations of the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. We attended many other events this year celebrating these landmarks, mostly in the spring -- lectures and symposia, but also a wonderful "radio play" starring Ed Asner in "The Great Tennessee Monkey Trial" (we saw it live, but a recording is now available on CD) and a show with a reenactment of Darwin by anthropologist Richard Milner ("Darwin Live").

Compared to more exuberant earlier events, the UC Berkeley exhibit was reserved and scholarly, but very interesting. There was a collection of original copies of The Origin of Species and there were actual tortoise shells and finch specimens from the Galapagos Islands, which Darwin visited as part of "the voyage of the Beagle." We viewed a printed book of Darwin's original handwritten notes from the Beagle -- very neatly entered, but difficult to read. We saw handwritten notes by Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) in his copy of one of Darwin's books and learned that he and Darwin read each other avidly and were friends.

The exhibit drew upon the book collections of UC Berkeley's libraries and the specimen collections of its museums. The university has a fantastic paleontology museum but most of its holdings are not displayed anywhere; it is a research museum. To peek inside its collection is a rare thrill. Kevin Padian, a well known biology professor at Berkeley who heads the paleontology museum and whom we heard speak at an evolution workshop this spring, helped organize the exhibit.

We were able to appreciate many of the exhibit items due to having read a book together, The Young Charles Darwin, by Keith Thomson. This is not a children's book, but a study of the scientific influences on Darwin that led to his interest in and exploration of evolutionary theory. We heard author Keith Thomson speak at the evolution workshop at Berkeley this past spring as well (he is highly entertaining). Lyell's and Hutton's books on geology, which we read about in detail in his book, were there in the exhibit along with books by many other thinkers who influenced Darwin.

I'm glad we squeaked in at the tail end of this exhibit. I left a note in the visitor's book about the fact that we are homeschooling and studying evolution. I really wanted them to know that these are not mutually exclusive activities.