In a nice bit of irony, the attention paid to the Dover, PA school board attempt to get Intelligent Design into schools gave a major boost to the success of the American Museum of Natural History exhibit on Darwin.
Niles Eldredge says the goal was merely to continue a series of New York exhibits on the world's great scientists. First came Leonardo da Vinci, then Albert Einstein. Why not Charles Darwin?Somewhere along the way, a certain Pennsylvania school board decided that Darwin's theory of evolution had "gaps" and "problems," and the ensuing media spotlight was brighter than any museum official could have hoped.
"In a sense, it was dumb luck," says Eldredge.
"Darwin" drew a half-million visitors at New York's American Museum of Natural History, where Eldredge, the exhibit curator, is a celebrated paleontologist. Now the show, billed as the broadest ever devoted to the British scientist, is at the Franklin Institute.
The Franklin is in Philadelphia.
I love it when the forces of ignorance generate rather than extinguish curiosity.
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I love it when the forces of ignorance generate rather than extinguish curiosity.
I'm still waiting for a publisher to astroturf in some go-censorship group (of whatever strip) as a way of marketing a book....
Doubtless the general angst over The Da Vinci Code (which is at best an entertaining thriller, not any breakthrough novel) helped make it into a huge must-read seller. I can't help but wonder if publishers try to help fuel that kind of broad denouncement of their books.
-Rob