Creation and Science Chronicle

Exhibit reveals Darwin as reluctant evolutionary
by Mitch Potter
Toronto Star (Canada), p. A2
November 23, 2008

Origin of Species writer tormented by findings Christian thought is still trying to reconcile

LONDON— Wandering through this biggest-ever reappraisal of Charles Darwin, you do not get a sense that here lies the enemy of God.

A doubter? Unquestionably. A man born to the clergy, yet one who lived in quiet agony as the evidence of science and the articles of faith did battle for decades between his ears? That too.

And finally, a man so wary of societal outrage that he held his silence a full 22 years before reluctantly publishing the revolutionary theory that upended our understanding of the world.

This is the man unveiled in “Darwin,” the newly installed celebration of the famous scientist’s life changing journey at the Natural History Museum in London.

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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.

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To understand a mockingbird: specimens that sparked Darwin’s theory of evolution
by Ian Sample Science correspondent
The Guardian, p. 3
November 14, 2008

The significance of the two birds lying side by side on a purple cushion with tags dangling from their feet is easy to miss. But the subtle differences — a strip of white on the wing, a smudge of dark on the breast — set Charles Darwin on course to develop the most important scientific theory ever conceived: the evolution of species through natural selection.

The mockingbirds are perhaps the most important specimens Darwin collected from the Galapagos during his five-year voyage aboard HMS Beagle in the 1830s, and today they go on show as part of a major exhibition at the Natural History Museum in London. It reveals Darwin as a tenacious scientist, a pragmatic lover, and a man pained by losing his religion.

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