Darwoophy

Before Darwin's time, humans were not considered part of the natural world.

Darwin, at the American Museum of Natural History, looks like a lovely exhibit. ButAnd:


How is it possible for scientists and natural historians with their specialized grasp of complexity to consort so readily with this sort of tabloid nonsense? It seems something of a simplification and distortion of the ways the world understood itself before Darwin. Even the Western world. It might have prevailed as a bourgeois view in several salons 18th and early 19th century London, and a few other places, including today's New York Times.

The people who work in evolution and the people who work in museums could do worse than talk with the people who work in myth, history, anthropology, art history, comparative religion, etc. And with people who don't work in anything academic, but happen to live in the world.

-- photo by filip de bont