'Darwin's Garden'
the Huntington displays some of the organic weapons Darwin used to start the ever-growing war between creationism and evolution
By Jana J. Monji 11/06/2008
Marking the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of his influential work “The Origin of the Species,” the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens is presenting “Darwin’s Garden: An Evolutionary Adventure,” an exhibit that includes rare books, manuscripts and illustrations, along with the items on loan until Jan. 5 from the New York Botanical Gardens. The Huntington’s own collection of Darwin artifacts includes “The Botanic Garden,” a 1791 book by Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus Darwin; Robert Hooke’s 1665 “Micrographia”; and James Bateman’s “The Orchidaceae of Mexico and Guatamala,” penned n 1837.
While Charles Darwin’s name is evoked in popular culture in connection with evolution and how that theory relates to humans, this exhibit explores Darwin as a botanist. Even on that monumental tour on the Beagle — the ship that brought Darwin to the Galapagos Islands in 1835 — he collected many samples of plants and noted the relation of the birds to the flora, paying particular attention to the “thenca,” or mockingbird.
Dan Lewis, a senior curator at the Huntington, said this was because mockingbirds were “bigger and flashier” than finches. “They were few and more distinctly different,” he said.
Later, of course, it would be the finches of the Galapagos Islands that would become crucial to the theory of evolution, something noted by John Gould in 1837. Yet they would be referred to as Darwin’s finches (also Galapagos finches). The changes in the shape and structure of the beak would be one of many examples of adaptation and evolution in species.
Darwin himself did not call this process of adaptation evolution. Rather, he used the term “transformism,” or development theory. His actual notebooks were called “Notebooks on the Transmutation of Species.” Evolution as a noun is never used in his “The Origin of the Species,” but he does end the book with the word “evolved.”
“There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms and most beautiful and most wonderful have been, are being evolved,” he wrote.
Darwin could have hardly imagined that even a century and a half after the publication of “Origin” his theories would be hotly contested. According to David S. Zeidberg, director of the library at the Huntington, “It wasn’t an either-or” argument about whether plants and animals evolved over time to adapt. Zeidberg called the resistance to evolutionary theory a “willful unwillingness” to accept what empirical data shows, even in the hybridization of plants for food purposes.
Looking at the illustrations and notations, mostly about plants, it’s hard to imagine that this serene and beautiful exhibit shows the beginning of a war of beliefs — evolution versus creationism — that rages to this day. It’s a revolution that began in an English garden with seeds sown in the imagination of a man viewing garden islands off the Pacific coast of South America. Who could have guessed?
“Darwin’s Garden: An Evolutionary Adventure” continues until Jan. 5 at Library West Hall, The Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens, 1151 Oxford Road, San Marino. For more information, call (626) 405-2100 or visit huntington.org.
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