Darwin or God?

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.
And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.
And God made the firmament,
and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament:
and it was so.
And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.

God or Darwin?

And on the third day goodness knows who created the Darwin exhibition.
And the exhibition was without form, and to be avoided, and darkness was still upon the face of the deep glazed exhibition cases.
And the Spirit of weak 40 lux bulbs moved upon the surfaces of the glazing.
And good visitors saw the light reflecting everywhere, except on the shaded manuscripts or even facsimiles, and the darkness we call a nightmare. And in the evening and the morning were the first visitors.
And they all said, Let there be an evolution in the midst of the darkness, and let it divide the originals from the facsimiles.
And goodness knows who made this firmament,
And divided were the opinions, which were under the firmament from the displays which were above the firmament and it was so.
And visitors called the firmament Hell. And the evening and the morning were needing fixing.

The first panel that is confronted has a schoolboy howler, a glaring typo. Was the word recieve, or receive? Does spell-checking not work in Word? Did God not invent Windows for homo sapiens? Yet the staff are aware of this though there is institutional complacency or apathy and the children come before the Lord and learn to spell incorrectly and the standards slip, retro-evolutionarily. SATs tests galore and failure abounds. Language evolves to texting. Gd noz hu cr8ed txt?

At this point I thought the display was an in-house production and that it would take a designer with a scalpel a couple of minutes to transpose the letters. I am a designer, I could have done it for you, but I wasn't carrying a weapon. But no, it gradually became clear that this was an American English experience. And a verbose one. Clearly produced by an academic who has allowed his 'designer' to import to America an impression of Victorian values. Dark wood colours, shiny brass, low light. Plastic Victoriana chic. But this is the 21st Century.

I spoke with an elderly woman at the display with the salad tomatoes on the branches of a tree. She hadn't seen the live iguana exhibit perched high up in the light, yes, even the iguana wanted more light, no it was not happy in that gloom either, celibate, without social company, imprisoned. The woman didn't understand that this animal eats salad from 'dog bowls'. Until it moved I was half minded that it was a plastic toy from the children's shop, but even I know that plastic iguanas don't eat cherry tomatoes :-)

Did the woman even see the fabulous ornate horned frog in the next case? It was a highlight of the exhibition; literally brightly lit but motionless and apathetic, complacent, wallowing in the flowing waters. Another monk or nun, the last frog before extinction? Evolution is cruel enough without the freak shows. Both this display and social Darwinism get a bad name for Science without Humanism. Still, with a figure like that, it was clearly chilled out and going with the flow.

Was it here that I started to wonder whether I had gone round in the wrong directon? It's an entrance to exit show but on one side the long panels read from top left to bottom right and on the other side they are the same so to make sense you have to move on a few yards/metres/fathoms ­ it was so dark it was as pleasant as drowning in the dark of the English Channel, or by Chappaquidich bridge.

One display case had a letter or some such document with local illumination insufficient to read in comfort, but then there was an umbra or penumbra from the ambient dark ­ sorry ­ light, that cast an even deeper band of gloom across the text. I can't recall the content of the document but I can relive the trauma and irritation trying to decipher the ghostly scrawl. A younger lass was struggling, she gave up, we gave up. With the text, and the display. We had both drowned in the gloom.

Then there was the noise pollution. At first you hear birdsong but there are no living birds on display. Then you hear the film sound-track, no, not just that one but the other one as well, and the second and the third bird-song. It's a cacophony. It was like being on the Underground; here is the platform announcement competing with the on-train announcement and then the busker in the background ­ did you catch any of the three, no, none. Sit isolated with your iPod deaf to the world and people around you. Bird song, film audio, second film audio . . . and darker than an underground platform to boot. I can read a paperback on the platform but not in the museum. I had to put my fingers in my ears to block out the distraction from reading the acres of white texts on dark brown fields. Have I been allotted to purgatory?

Drag, creep, crawl, stroll, clamber, evolve on to the first film show. I've forgotten now what it was about. The sub-titles wouldn't be needed even for the hard of hearing if there wasn't so much noise pollution. If it was for the audio-impaired, where was the hearing-loop? Elsewhere, out of the loop!

When the eyes are denied sensory input by the inadequately lit displays there is then an exaggeration of the other senses; here comes hearing, everything, but little that was tactile, nothing to smell or taste. Maybe a small whiff of 100% proof sensory deprivation. The man slides silently across the bench, we listen attentively in silence, I slide silently across, the woman next to me says thankyou ­ such a minimal American English accent, but the courtesy is quite beautiful. Ah, the trace of Eau de Sensory Deprivation lingers in the air. Did they formulate this for Guantanamo Bay perhaps?

At this point I was ready to make a bee-line for the exit but the show was only one third done. And with all the hive collapse there was no trail to follow the bees. I tracked on at speed around the other two thirds to see what was ahead and found the slips of paper for comments, and the pencils. But no more light than anywhere else. I struggled with reflected light to fill in the form, a feint brownish ink in a dark brown gloom, no candles to hand, in this authentic Victorian gloom.

And back by the first film booth, I looked at the display of pressed plant samples in frames on the outside wall - though they were not original samples but photographs in cheap frames. This reminded me of an Italian restaurant in New Jersey in the 1970's, full colour reproductions from The Sunday Times or the New York Times in full 'color'; torn, and framed in grottoes: candle light, fake atmosphere, microwave pasta, Muzac, doggy bags for senior citizens. Sanctuary for the Godfather.

How does this premier British Natural History Museum sink to the level of pseudo or kitsch displays when we have either the authentic products in the millions at Kew Gardens, or the DHL facility to fly fresh, authentic samples from anywhere from Darwin's grand tour? Of course living plants would soon die for lack of light, like the visitors. I wondered why the gallery staff paced up and down so frequently. It seemed to be one uniformed staff for each uninformed visitor, is this the first sign of paranoia?

And still no light on the subject. Was God on holiday? Have the French started cutting back the electricity supplies even from their nuclear power stations? Doomsday returns. Had God snuck off to create a better World? Had he realized that even the black economy was bankrupt? Had he succumbed at last to Darwin's Theory? Was his experiment failing? Out of the dark there should have come light but here it was still nearly dark. Should I have gone on Sunday? Was the American designer a creationist? Dollars in his pocket substantiating 'In God We Trust'. I might trust him if he would just switch the lights back on!

I had struggled so far to read everything. The ticket desk suggested that it would take at least an hour and a half but already the gallery staff were saying they would be closing in 15 minutes. I hope I judged the other parts well, I raced on almost at the speed of light. I could almost hear the echoes from the Big Bang. The blur of time travel. The remaining Darwin displays, they were familiar stuff. I have the books. I have encouraged my daughter from age 5 to believe in the Scientific Proof of Evolution. Darwin's (and others') Theory/ies of Evolution, proven. Q.E.D.
My daughter is now studying Natural Sciences at university.

What reason could there be to under-illuminate skulls ­ they won't bleach more than white bones that are already bleached of flesh. I kept the last few minutes before closing for the other film cubicle. Quite frivolous, unexplained, trivial. Perfectly open to misinterpretation by schoolchildren. If they still have determination to believe in Creationism then God, and the syllabus, is on their side.

The exhibition was a huge let down. The Natural History Museum with its exquisite architecture; sculptural animal and vegetable motifs adorning walls, arches, columns, ceilings, mosaics, the very fabric of the building, a cathedral to evolution reduced by the gloom. Is there a surplus of bushel baskets for hiding talents and lights? Is this proof that science has given up the Ghost?

And so out to the shop which I had visited before going into the exhibition. It's a habit I have. I am accustomed over forty years for the exhibitions being inferior to the documentation. This is the first major exhibition I can recall in London since 1964 that has not had some sort of leaflet, brochure or catalogue.

The Natural History Museum website is quite adequate, the American Museum of Natural History website is evidence of the source of the aesthetic problem.

In Britain we have a continuous engagement with the evolution of the sciences, aesthetics and design through from The Great Exhibition of 1851 to now in the 21st Century. I wasn't there at The Great Exhibition of 1851 but Darwin was so enthused that he visited many times. Sorry Charles, I won't be going to your exhibition more than this once. Sadly the American typographic, design and display aesthetic has sunk in the quagmire of creationist kitsch and retro repro 20th Century nostalgia. Victoria and Albert established the V&A, the Natural History Museum, and the Science Museum at South Kensington. The vision was there even if Albert died prematurely. Thereafter came the Royal College of Art, attached to the V&A.

Did you, the museum, profit from my experience?
I bought my daughter the Darwin doll; silly, frivolous, but friendly. We have a flamingo doll, perhaps also bought at the Natural History Museum, or London Zoo, so they will look well together, in the bright daylight.
I bought myself a Diary 2009 which is so well illustrated that the exhibition has no excuse for being that bad. I will illuminate it with entries in clear humanist calligraphy.
And I bought the 2009 Darwin coin. It would have been money better spent in the shop than on the exhibition entry ticket.
Heaven is not to be found at the Natural History Museum. The parrot is dead, it is a deceased parrot.
The joke is dead, it is extinct. Is God having a last laugh? Is Charles Darwin a prophet after all!
Much of the Darwin exhibition was and is invisible. But still, if you are last to leave the room, switch off the lights behind you, if you can find the switch.

Brian Marsh, 25 November 2008

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There are two conducted tours of the fabulous Darwin Centre. I booked my ticket while I was visiting the museum. First you must put all bags in the cloakroom, it's free for this tour. Then you are directed, with a paper map if you need, to the entrance to the Darwin Centre. It's a short walk outside the museum grounds to a separate entrance. A staff member greets the group, we were six in number. The building is several stories high and a glass lift takes us up to the top of the building where the scientists quietly pursue their researches.

The resources of the centre are available free of charge, despatched internationally in exchanges with similarly reciprocated research resources.

Across the floor, through an airlock, there are endless ranks of storage cupboards containing wet samples. Carefully preserved specimens in jars of alcohol await research. A couple of cupboards are displayed with special exhibits, the species jars here marked with a red paint. In another display, Darwin's use yellow paint.

The lift takes us back down to a large room with tanks and jars. In the centre of the room is a vast plastic tank holding an equally vast pale squid over 18 metres in length. The preservation fluid is formaldehyde. The suckers on the tentacles bear rings of sharp spikes that hold the prey. The squid was caught while alive but died in the rapid process of decompression taken up from the depths of the ocean.

Then we see the precious, yellow painted, wet samples collected by Charles Darwin on HMS Beagle. In the centre of the room there are large metal tanks containing assorted sharks amongst other things. And around the room large, old, hand blown jars containing unimaginably contorted snakes and a multitude of fish. Some are in large quantities, compressed in glass cuboids. Others are in tall cylinders, several fish spiralling freely and elegantly in the column. Then we are drawn to a huge coelocanth, once believed to be a fossil and long extinct but subsequently found in the Indian Ocean near Madagascar, living at great depth. The fish displays rudimentary 'arms' by which it might pass the opportunity for fish to leave the sea and traverse the beach.

The staff member is thoroughly entertaining in a completely professional manner. Our naive questions are tolerated. We are encouraged to engage in responding to examples such as the coelocanth. Thank goodness the National Geographic magazine, many years ago, had such interesting articles and photographs of these interesting fish.

The question of whether there were any species modified by man's nuclear tests, such as Operation Hurricane in the Monte Bello Islands, was unanswerable. At least the young British and Australian armed services personnel exposed to radiation all those years ago have, in some cases, had children and grandchildren with inherited illnesses. Perhaps the same is true for turtles and other species that inhabit the waters of the bomb site by Trimouille Island.

The tour ended all too soon and everyone was hugely impressed and appreciative of the effort taken on our behalf.

27 November 2009

The Exhibition. Second-hand, imported? Cheap, shoddy. Value for money experience: Poor Spelling errors: i before e except after c American English spelling: throughout The first panel that is confronted has a schoolboy howler, a glaring typo. Was the word recieve, or receive? Does spell-checking not work in Word? Did God not invent Windows for homo sapiens? Yet the staff are aware of this though there is institutional complacency or apathy and the children come before the Lord and learn to spell incorrectly and the standards slip, retro-evolutionarily. SATs tests galore and failure abounds. Language evolves to texting. Gd noz hu cr8ed txt? At this point I thought the display was an in-house production and that it would take a designer with a scalpel a couple of minutes to transpose the letters. I am a designer, I could have done it for you, but I wasn't carrying a weapon. But no, it gradually became clear that this was an American English experience. And a verbose one. Clearly produced by an academic who has allowed his 'designer' to import to America an impression of Victorian values. Dark wood colours, shiny brass, low light. Plastic Victoriana chic. But this is the 21st Century. I spoke with an elderly woman at the display with the salad tomatoes on the branches of a tree. She hadn't seen the live iguana exhibit perched high up in the light, yes, even the iguana wanted more light, no it was not happy in that gloom either, celibate, without social company, imprisoned. The woman didn't understand that this animal eats salad from 'dog bowls'. Until it moved I was half minded that it was a plastic toy from the children's shop, but even I know that plastic iguanas don't eat cherry tomatoes :-) Did the woman even see the fabulous ornate horned frog in the next case? It was a highlight of the exhibition; literally brightly lit but motionless and apathetic, complacent, wallowing in the flowing waters. Another monk or nun, the last frog before extinction? Evolution is cruel enough without the freak shows. Both this display and social Darwinism get a bad name for Science without Humanism. Still, with a figure like that, it was clearly chilled out and going with the flow. Was it here that I started to wonder whether I had gone round in the wrong directon? It's an entrance to exit show but on one side the long panels read from top left to bottom right and on the other side they are the same so to make sense you have to move on a few yards/metres/fathoms ­ it was so dark it was as pleasant as drowning in the dark of the English Channel, or by Chappaquidich bridge. One display case had a letter or some such document with local illumination insufficient to read in comfort, but then there was an umbra or penumbra from the ambient dark ­ sorry ­ light, that cast an even deeper band of gloom across the text. I can't recall the content of the document but I can relive the trauma and irritation trying to decipher the ghostly scrawl. A younger lass was struggling, she gave up, we gave up. With the text, and the display. We had both drowned in the gloom. Then there was the noise pollution. At first you hear birdsong but there are no living birds on display. Then you hear the film sound-track, no, not just that one but the other one as well, and the second and the third bird-song. It's a cacophony. It was like being on the Underground; here is the platform announcement competing with the on-train announcement and then the busker in the background ­ did you catch any of the three, no, none. Sit isolated with your iPod deaf to the world and people around you. Bird song, film audio, second film audio . . . and darker than an underground platform to boot. I can read a paperback on the platform but not in the museum. I had to put my fingers in my ears to block out the distraction from reading the acres of white texts on dark brown fields. Have I been allotted to purgatory? Drag, creep, crawl, stroll, clamber, evolve on to the first film show. I've forgotten now what it was about. The sub-titles wouldn't be needed even for the hard of hearing if there wasn't so much noise pollution. If it was for the audio-impaired, where was the hearing-loop? Elsewhere, out of the loop! When the eyes are denied sensory input by the inadequately lit displays there is then an exaggeration of the other senses; here comes hearing, everything, but little that was tactile, nothing to smell or taste. Maybe a small whiff of 100% proof sensory deprivation. The man slides silently across the bench, we listen attentively in silence, I slide silently across, the woman next to me says thankyou ­ such a minimal American English accent, but the courtesy is quite beautiful. Ah, the trace of Eau de Sensory Deprivation lingers in the air. Did they formulate this for Guantanamo Bay perhaps? At this point I was ready to make a bee-line for the exit but the show was only one third done. And with all the hive collapse there was no trail to follow the bees. I tracked on at speed around the other two thirds to see what was ahead and found the slips of paper for comments, and the pencils. But no more light than anywhere else. I struggled with reflected light to fill in the form, a feint brownish ink in a dark brown gloom, no candles to hand, in this authentic Victorian gloom. And back by the first film booth, I looked at the display of pressed plant samples in frames on the outside wall - though they were not original samples but photographs in cheap frames. This reminded me of an Italian restaurant in New Jersey in the 1970's, full colour reproductions from The Sunday Times or the New York Times in full 'color'; torn, and framed in grottoes: candle light, fake atmosphere, microwave pasta, Muzac, doggy bags for senior citizens. Sanctuary for the Godfather. How does this premier British Natural History Museum sink to the level of pseudo or kitsch displays when we have either the authentic products in the millions at Kew Gardens, or the DHL facility to fly fresh, authentic samples from anywhere from Darwin's grand tour? Of course living plants would soon die for lack of light, like the visitors. I wondered why the gallery staff paced up and down so frequently. It seemed to be one uniformed staff for each uninformed visitor, is this the first sign of paranoia? And still no light on the subject. Was God on holiday? Have the French started cutting back the electricity supplies even from their nuclear power stations? Doomsday returns. Had God snuck off to create a better World? Had he realized that even the black economy was bankrupt? Had he succumbed at last to Darwin's Theory? Was his experiment failing? Out of the dark there should have come light but here it was still nearly dark. Should I have gone on Sunday? Was the American designer a creationist? Dollars in his pocket substantiating 'In God We Trust'. I might trust him if he would just switch the lights back on! I had struggled so far to read everything. The ticket desk suggested that it would take at least an hour and a half but already the gallery staff were saying they would be closing