While Observer writer, Robin McKie, teased readers with a purported review of the new Darwin Bicentennial exhibit at the Natural History Museum in London, her real intent seemed be another “save the species” (i.e, the planet) call for action.
Of course, political correctness gone wild is not limited to pop science writers. The same issue of The Observer has another article by Robin McKie in which she notes evolutionist Steve Jones is upset with the Bank of England for allowing a hummingbird to be on a 10 pound note commemorating Darwin’s Galapagos Island studies. Hummingbirds do not exist in the Galapagos Islands and apparently Darwin never even discussed these birds in any of his writings!
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Looking the truth right in the eye
by Robin McKie
The Observer (UK), The Critics, p .11
November 16, 2008
Confronting visitors as they enter the Natural History Museum’s bicentennial tribute to Charles Darwin is a plinth with a plush purple cushion on top. Two pale-coloured mockingbirds rest there in elegant repose, their labelled claws pointing upwards. Caught by Darwin in the Galapagos in 1835, the birds – previously stored in the museum’s vaults – are being displayed in public for the first time.
These are no mere historical curios, however. Although at first glance they look similar, a closer examination reveals key differences. One bird – from the island of Floreana – is darker and has wing bands and a relatively large beak, features that surprised Darwin at the time. Until then, the young naturalist had thought all mockingbirds would be light-coloured like the second specimen (from San Cristóbal island) on the plinth. Such differences – in creatures supposedly from the same species – intrigued Darwin and set him thinking about how animals might change and then evolve into new creatures. ‘Such facts undermine the stability of species,’ he wrote of his mockingbirds in a notebook, also displayed here.
