Evolution exhibit in Chicago challenges creationists
A Dicynodont synapsid
The cute cartoon characters that eat each other in a new educational video about natural selection seem benign enough, but they are part of a growing battle in the United States over the theory of evolution.
On Friday, Chicago's renowned Field Museum will become the latest institution to combat creationism with a new permanent exhibit detailing the process of evolution.
At a preview of the exhibit earlier this week, the Field's president said museums need to lead the defense of evolution because they don't face the same level of "intimidation" as schools.
A life-size reconstruction of the famous fossil of Lucy, one of the earliest members of our human family.
John McCarter also warned that the United States is in danger of losing its position as a technological leader because efforts to add the religiously-based theory of intelligent design to school curriculums is undermining the culture of scientific inquiry.
Though Charles Darwin's theory of evolution is accepted as fact among scientists, most Americans think otherwise.
In a nationwide Gallup poll released last fall, 53 percent of American adults agreed with the statement that God created humans in their present form exactly the way the Bible describes it.
Thirty-one percent stood by the "intelligent design" stance that humans evolved over millions of years from other forms of life and God guided the process, while only 12 percent said humans have evolved from other forms of life and "God has no part."
While the Supreme Court has ruled that creationism cannot be forced into schools, it is nonetheless taught in classrooms and US President George W. Bush has said he supports teaching intelligent design to American students on the grounds of allowing differing schools of thought to contend.
The push to get intelligent design into schools suffered a serious setback in December when a Pennsylvania court ruled that it was a religious rather than a scientific theory and banned it from the state's classrooms.
But proponents have not given up the fight and are now pushing to force science teachers to "critically analyze" the shortcomings of Darwin's theory.
Unlike some museums which directly challenge intelligent design, the Field's Evolving Planet exhibit simply leaves God out of the equation.
"There may be places to debate the conflict between evolution and intelligent design but that's in a philosophy class, not in a scientific institution," Lance Grande, head of collections and research at the Field told AFP.
While there may be a number of "missing links" in evolution, that's more a result of holes in the fossilized record than a problem with the theory, Grande said.
"It takes very special conditions to become fossilized," he explained as he stood in front of the oldest complete fossil of a bat.
"The organism has to be buried under water before it's been torn apart by scavengers or rots and it has to be mineralized," he said.
The goal of the exhibit is to engage children and other visitors in the history of how life evolved on the planet.
It begins 4 billion years ago with single-cell organisms and leads visitors through to the present, which is described as the sixth period of mass extinction.
"I hope that will make people understand it's part of our responsibility as humans to minimize our impact on the planet," Gande said as a clock ticked toward 82, the number of species that become extinct every day as a result of human activity.
The artful layout and more than 150 interactive displays were designed to slow children down as they rushed to see the dinosaurs.
There are a number of gems in the collection's nearly 1,300 specimens.
The dinosaur hall includes representatives from every major group including the 18-foot-long youngster of a new dinosaur, Rapetosaurus, that was recently discovered in Madagascar.
The museum - which is one of the world's leading institutions of specimen-based research - also displays a remarkable collection of fossils, including a pregnant stingray and the oldest known fossil of cells whose DNA is contained within a nucleus.
An eerie life-like reproduction of Lucy - the skeleton known as the 'missing link' whose discovery in 1974 proved that humans walked upright before their brains developed - dominates the hominid display.
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