Dry Store Room No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum. Richard Fortey

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СКАЧАТЬ after all, this was the day when one went down to the country for the weekend. Later, when one didn’t, the sports jacket became a kind of signature uniform for the museum scientist, complete with leather elbow patches. It indicated an endearing otherworldliness. Too much smartness might betray the wrong priorities, and an inadequate grasp of the carabids. One of my colleagues always wore a marvellously baggy bit of ancient tweed that looked as if it might house a selection of undiscovered species of small organisms. I hope it was curated somewhere upon his retirement, just in case.

      Most of the scientists behind the scenes are there because they are devoted to their organisms, like a good priest to his flock. At the present time, there are fewer scientists who exactly correspond to the specialist as I encountered him when I first walked around the Natural History Museum. As we shall see, there are many different kinds of systematic activities today. But it is still true that the taxonomic mission underlies the research programme. In this respect, a museum is different from a university department, where teaching and research run hand in hand, but research does not have to be related to collections. It is the collections that give a museum its signature, its durability, its ultimate purpose.

      The Natural History Museum collections were moved from the mother institution in Bloomsbury; the transfer to the splendid new building was completed by August 1883. Richard Owen, he who had looked down upon me during my interview, was the driving force behind setting up an independent place to house natural history collections. He had previously been Superintendent of the Natural History Departments in the original British Museum, and argued that the collections had become too large for a billet among the antiquaries. Owen was a brilliant scientist and scholar, intensely ambitious, sometimes devious, a British pioneer in the study of comparative anatomy, and a guru of the bones. For example, he named the moa from its skeleton. The moa is an extinct flightless bird that walked around New Zealand until the arrival of mankind almost certainly extinguished the feathered giant; the scientific name was Dinornis maximus. Ornis is a bird in Greek, as in the word ornithology; Dino- = terrible as in ‘dinosaur’, ‘terrible lizard’; maximus hardly requires explanation. His judgement rarely faltered when it came to appraising what a sample of bones meant in terms of its closest zoological neighbours. Yet he was no evolutionist. He opposed Darwin vigorously, even after the latter’s theory of evolution had won the day among the intellectual class in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Owen’s vision of a natural history museum was as a kind of paean to the Creator, a magnificent tribute to the glory of his works, a roll call of the splendid species created by His munificence and love for mankind. The words that I used to sing as a child put it thus: ‘All things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small/all things wise and wonderful, the Lord God made them all.’ The cathedral-like entrance to the great new museum, the nave-like main hall, those columns with their decking of leaves or biological swirls, they all had a message. Here was a temple to nature that was also a shrine to the Ancient of Days.

      Owen was an establishment figure par excellence. He knew the Prime Minister William Gladstone very well in the 1860s, and had even been a tutor in natural history for the royal children at Buckingham Palace. No museum figure of modern times has been so close to the seat of power. Owen knew how to make things happen, and his persistent lobbying eventually yielded dividends in the form of Alfred Waterhouse’s vivid new building. Prince Albert, Queen Victoria’s beloved husband, was sympathetic to housing natural history collections in his developing cultural ‘theme park’ in Kensington, and opposite the industrial crafts of the ‘V&A’ along Exhibition Road. The Prince’s effigy, covered in gold, still broods over the Albert Hall a few minutes’ walk north of the Museum on the edge of Kensington Gardens. Owen was trusted to design a museum with sufficient seriousness to satisfy the Victorian sense of self-improvement through knowledge, or as the Keeper of Mineralogy put it in 1880: ‘the awakening of an intelligent interest in the mind of the general visitor’. Owen certainly intended to display in the main hall what he called an ‘index museum’ of the main designs of animals in nature, intended to be a kind of homage to the fecundity and orderliness of the Creator. However, by 1884 when the Museum formally appointed its first Director, William Flower, the principle of evolutionary descent seemed to be the only acceptable way to organize nature for explanatory purposes. The cathedral had been hijacked for secular ends, and the temple of nature had become a celebration of the power of natural rather than supernatural creativity.

      Richard Owen in old age with the skeleton he helped to reconstruct of theextinct New Zealand moa, the world’s largest bird.

      Richard Owen with moa skeleton. From Richard Owen, Memoirs on the extinct wingless birds of New Zealand. Vol 2. London: John Van Voorst, 1879, plate XCVII.

      There are large marble statues of both Charles Darwin and his famous public champion, Thomas Henry Huxley, on display in the Natural History Museum. There is also a bronze of Richard Owen. Few visitors seem to notice them, or pause to read their plaques. Darwin and Huxley look out over a refreshment area on the ground floor, so the great men contemplate a clutter of tables rather than the grandeur of nature.* A seated Darwin is in the splendour of his old age, every inch the bearded patriarch; Huxley, seated nearby, is brooding and imperious. Richard Owen stands around the corner, in academic dress, halfway up the main flight of stairs facing the main entrance. His hands are slightly outstretched, and at least to my eye there is something clerical about him, as if he were offering a blessing rather than a specimen, although his face is still fierce and commanding. The formality and equality of white stone have somehow ironed out the differences between Darwin and Huxley; it is their enquiring spirit that pervades the Museum. They have become the saints in the place. Oddly, the dark bronze of Owen seems more out of place, as if its metallic heaviness were symbolic of the arguments lost to the presiding genius of Darwin, beatified in marble.

      It is curious to reflect that the differences that separated these two men, the bronze and the marble, still count today, well over a century later. London is dotted with memorials to its great scientists. Newton is in the Royal Society; Michael Faraday stands outside the Institute of Electrical Engineers on the Embankment. Yet nobody challenges the insights that Faraday or Newton had into the workings of the world (while recognizing, of course, that understanding has also moved on). Yet there are those who would still side with Owen, against Darwin and Huxley, on the subject of biological evolution – they would seek to reverse their respective historical roles and, no doubt, cast out the marble statues. This view is predicated on the idea that evolution is ‘just a theory’; and that other theories – which in fact mean only ‘creation science’ or its close relative ‘intelligent design’ – deserve an equal airing. There are some important and interesting matters hidden away in this argument. There are, indeed, some theoretical issues in evolutionary theory that are still being investigated; indeed, there are whole journals devoted to such questions. Furthermore this is what science is about – probing questions, not just giving ‘the answer’. Physics and chemistry are no different in this regard – they are full of theories in the process of being tested. So are cosmology and economics. But the crux for the statue of Darwin is a third consideration. The issue of ‘creation science’ is not the kind of theoretical question about kin selection that might be found in a scientific journal, it’s about whether evolution happened at all. Put bluntly, it is about whether or not we share a common ancestor with a chimpanzee. The descent of all life through evolutionary processes is not a ‘theory’ in the sense that the creationists would have us believe. So overwhelming is the evidence for evolution by descent that one could say that it is as secure as the fact that the Earth goes around the Sun and not the other way around. Every new discovery about the genome is consistent with evolution having happened. Whether we find it appealing or not is another question, but personally I like being fourth cousin to a mushroom, and having a bonobo as my closest living relative. It makes me feel a real part of the world. So those who promulgate ‘creation science’ are trying to pull off a trick of intellectual legerdemain, a mind jump concealed by jiggery-pokery, mixing in the truly theoretical with what most scientists СКАЧАТЬ