Exhibition and bookThe evolution of a great mind: the life and work of Darwin

摘要

In 1966, an American graduate student was supervising my live-trapping of rats in a grain warehouse in Calcutta. A few years my senior, he was doing field work for his doctorate in ecology from a leading American research university. We recorded the numbers of fleas on each rat as part of a study of the transmission of plague. Some rats had far more fleas, and other rats had far fewer, than would have been expected from a random (Poisson) distribution of fleas. I began speculating to the graduate student that this over-dispersed frequency distribution had evolutionary implications. In that cramped, hot room stacked high with bags of grain, he said to me: "You know, I don't think I could ever believe in evolution." Uncharacteristically-because I was stunned speechless, not because of any great self-control-I kept my mouth shut. I learned then, and have never forgotten, that evolution's roots on my home continent may have penetrated the topsoil but have not yet breached the bedrock. Only in 1987, in Edwards v Arkansas, did the US Supreme Court proscribe the teaching of creation science in all American public schools.40 years too late for my Calcutta adventure, the exhibition Darwin would have been my best response to the mental fog in the minds of that then-young man and the 57% of today's Americans who, according to a public opinion poll, say they believe in, or lean toward, creationism. This exhibition and the accompanying book by the curator Niles Eldredge could not be more timely or more needed.