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If you venture down to the basement of Toronto's Royal Ontario Museum these days, you will be greeted by two big tortoises waddling about in a glass enclosure. They are a living prologue to Darwin: The Evolution Revolution, the new exhibition opening at the ROM today, and they are, in truth, more gimmick than artifact. The pair, on loan from a local reptile zoo, are African spurred tortoises, a different species from the much larger Galapagos tortoises Charles Darwin encountered on his famous voyage to South America.
Their startling presence in the midst of a museum usually dedicated to the inanimate can hardly be called a curatorial necessity, but it is crucial to the showmanship of an exhibition that succeeds in having it both ways, entertaining as it enlightens. What follows the tortoises is an engrossing intellectual biography of Darwin, tracking the research and reasoning that led to the groundbreaking theory of evolution expressed in On The Origin of the Species. The show was organized by the American Museum of Natural History in New York, with the ROM and science museums in Boston, Chicago and London as collaborators. It also includes a live iguana and some frogs – as well as about 260 artifacts and about 40,000 words worth of text panels. It will take a committed adult visitor at least two hours to do justice to an exhibition that represents contemporary museum programming at its most convincing.
The visitor begins in the early 1800s, at the dawn of the Darwinian age, when a new curiosity about the history of the natural world was replacing a belief in a static hierarchy of God over man and man over beast. A Victorian museum case full of animals' skeletons captures the moment perfectly. Who looking at the skeleton of a cat, a dog and a monkey would not notice the similarities between species? Who gazing at the amazing coiled structure of a cobra's spine would not understand how many people, to this day, see a beauty in nature they can only attribute to an unseen creator?
From there, the exhibition gives Darwin's family history before moving swiftly to the remarkable voyage of the HMS Beagle from 1831 to 1836. During this much-prolonged British government mapping expedition to South America, Darwin, then just a budding young naturalist, collected and shipped home thousands of specimens, many of which had never been seen in Europe before. The exhibition shows you Darwin's hammer (for collecting fossils) and his magnifying glass, but best of all it includes specimens he actually collected, many of them on loan from London's Museum of Natural History. There are some of the beetles he pursued so feverishly as a boy, a piece of petrified wood, the skull of an extinct mammal known as a toxodon that he bought from some boys from Uruguay boys who were using it for target practice, and pressed samples of plants and flowers that were among the many unique finds he made in the Galapagos Islands.
Darwin was struck by the similarities between different embryos. From left are a horse embryo, a mouse and a bat. (FRED LUM/THE GLOBE AND MAIL)
Almost immediately, Darwin began to speculate about how different species had evolved their distinct traits and to develop his theory of natural selection, but it would be years before he felt the world was ready for it. That period is represented here by a recreation of Darwin's study at Down House, his country residence not far from London, and a single page from the actual manuscript of On The Origin of the Species. (There are only a handful of the original pages left in existence.) He only finally published his book in 1859 because he feared he was about to be scooped by another naturalist.
And then came the firestorm. The Evolution Revolution also does an excellent job of addressing the social controversy Darwin's ideas ignited and the way in which Darwin's work provides the basis for contemporary biology, paleontology and genetics. This section of the show includes a video in which a variety of American scientists discuss the relationship between religious faith and science: One of them argues with some passion that the two are not contradictory.
Interestingly, when The Evolution Revolution opened in New York in 2005, there was not a peep of protest out of the creationists, although neither the ROM nor any of the other North American venues have been able to find corporate sponsors brave enough to underwrite the show. One might conclude that creationists simply stayed away, but since more than more than half of Americans tell pollsters they believe in some version of creationism, that seems unlikely.
Perhaps The Evolution Revolution stunned them into silence. Many of us know of evolution only as a fait accompli represented in our imaginations by that erroneous illustration of the ape metamorphosing into the man. (In the show, there's a more up-to-date illustration proposing a more complicated relationship between humans and other primates. It takes the form of a wall full of skulls tracing the various species back to a common ancestor.) Instead of presenting a static fact, The Evolution Revolution immerses visitors in the beauty of plants and animals, fossils and sponges, and then invites them to follow the intellectual development that Darwin himself underwent. In doing so, it makes his thinking enthralling and his conclusions inspiring.
The physical installation of this wonderful exhibition in the basement of the ROM's new Michael Lee-Chin Crystal is not without some problems. The Garfield Weston Exhibition Hall, specifically designed for temporary shows, is such a non-descript space (barring a few awkward pillars) that you would have thought the museum could have configured it any way it chose, but passage through the galleries feels illogical at times. The ROM felt it had enough room to add its own children's area at the end of the show, offering a few more opportunities to play in what is otherwise a very adult museum experience, but the first section seems crowded, while the route through the middle section can be confusing. And you end, of course, with open passage through a generously spaced gift shop, a layout that is no less offensive for being standard museum practice these days.
In intellectual terms, on the other hand, The Evolution Revolution is a perfect fit for the ROM. The museum is increasingly trying to define its confusingly broad mandate, turning the old Victorian museum of everything into a modern institution driven by a bifurcated collection it can neatly summarize with the words “World Cultures. Natural History.” That's a good beginning, but what is even better is this rare exhibition about both nature and culture, an engaging exercise that can explain the social reaction to science on the one hand and put science in its cultural context on the other. It would take a real flat-earther not to be seduced.
Darwin: The Evolution Revolution continues through Aug. 4 at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto (information: 416-586-8000 or www.rom.on.ca).
