Evolution is a Four Letter Word
This post is written by Latitude 53’s Writer In Residence, Carolyn Jervis. She will be writing critically about Latitude 53 programming, the community and more on a regular basis over a six month term from April to September. Read more about the Writer In Residence program.
On Saturday I found out that it’s possible to create a museum exhibition about natural selection without making direct mention of the word evolution more than twice.
Over the past couple of years, the media and visual culture have been telling stories of Darwin to mark the 200th anniversary of his birth. My requisite lawn-mowing podcast, CBC’s “Ideas”, has recently been presenting a multi-part series on the evolution pioneer. Two years ago, the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) exhibition “Evolution Revolution,” was presented without the aid of the museum’s regular corporate sponsors and found their turn with the American Museum of Natural History’s exhibition instead funded by the Humanist Association of Canada and the United Church of Canada.
Last Saturday I was catching up with a friend while on a visit to the AGA. She told me there was a show about natural selection at our Royal Alberta Museum. Who knew? After reading the paragraph about the show on their website, I knew something was amiss, and suddenly my previous ignorance of the exhibition’s existence began to make sense:
“People are naturally curious about the world around them. Museum researchers channel their natural curiosity into research projects that take them out into the field, into the forests, upon frozen lakes and deep into our collection rooms. Natural Selections features eight recent projects from Royal Alberta Museum scientists. Each project draws on the Museum’s collections to produce new information and offer different perspectives on Alberta’s biodiversity, past and present.”
There are many things that merit conversation in this exhibition. I threw myself into explorer mode as I searched through displays about ancient bear species and comparisons of taxidermy birds on sticks. It’s important to celebrate the work of our local scientific community, and I’m glad that I have the opportunity to learn more about the history of my province’s creatures and their ancestors in the process. Quotations from curators and featured scientists along with video interviews were successful in personalizing the data and giving recognition to the people behind the research. But the lessons I learned are quite clearly Darwin derived, which was a message being transmitted in the exhibition at a very low volume. You don’t have to read too far between the lines to see how undeniably central Darwin is to these contemporary scientific studies.
So why is evolution treated as a four letter word, even within these sanctums of scientific knowledge and learning?
As the “feedback” from the ROM’s show illustrates, not to mention the very existence of Big Valley, Alberta’s Creation Science Museum, there is a lot that remains contested about the ideas Darwin postulated. And these claims have widely ranging levels of legitimacy. This isn’t news, but the effect that the tension around ideas of evolution has on exhibition practices is fascinating, if not disconcerting.
As I have learned from my nerdy form of lawn-mowing entertainment, there is a long history of concern about how evolutionary theory will be received. According to the science historians from my podcast, Darwin sat on his research and analysis for over a decade for fear of how they might be treated by his peers in the scientific and religious communities. So, right from the very inception of his theories, there has been awareness that many people will experience them as a threat to their core values. Why can’t this be part of the conversation?
Alberta really is the perfect place for this conversation to take place. Not only is there excellent research being developed that traces the lineage of our province’s contemporary species, but we also have our very own creationist museum. We live in a province that has a sad and disturbing history of eugenics, leading the government to institutionalize and sometimes sterilize people deemed “unworthy” of reproducing due to their perceived threat to the quality of the gene pool.
While this is a bit of a side step from natural selection, it does show a perversion of scientific research and analysis that attempts to sort through what’s learned and what’s inherited in our behaviors and appearances. Darwin was a source of inspiration for the Nazi regime’s notion of a “master race’, leading to the absolute horror of the Holocaust. They share ideas of white supremacy with the Ku Klux Klan, which had active members in Southern Alberta around Lethbridge. What a fascinating and complex exhibit it could be if the celebration of science was juxtaposed with this local history about how important science can be manipulated and abused for violent and xenophobic purposes.
To return to the ROM’s “Evolution Revolution,” taking a closer look at how that exhibit was made possible indicates why I didn’t find a more provocative show at our museum. The show in Toronto almost didn’t receive the necessary funding to bring the travelling exhibition to the city. Over 40 of the museum’s regular sponsors were approached and all of these people and corporations were fearful of being associated with the controversy they anticipated.
If Alberta’s museum which, it is important to note, runs under the auspices of the provincial government, was to take an approach that risked greater controversy, perhaps there would have been more of a chance for open dialogue. Perhaps I would have felt less like the story I was reading between the lines was a bit apologetic for bringing up Darwin every now and then. However, what this approach did not do was significantly take the focus off of the way local scientists are applying ideas of natural selection to learn more about our province’s natural history. That is a story worth sharing, and one that could easily have gotten lost in efforts to juxtapose this application of Darwin with that of eugenicists and the KKK of Southern Alberta.
That being said, I almost didn’t go to the show because I didn’t have the usual cues to give me a hand in discovering its existence. I have trouble believing that the lack of media coverage and advertising of this show is some sort of coincidence given the exhibition’s subject matter. It is easy to understand but no less disappointing when fear of negative public opinion gets in the way of supporting stories and scientists worthy of our celebration.
