For Immediate Release Contact: Nancy O'Shea (312) 665-7103 (For Media Use Only) An Eye-Opening Voyage around the World Darwin called his five-year voyage “by far the most important event in my life,” and the exhibition reflects that role. From the auspicious letter offering him a spot on the Beagle, to his attempts to persuade his father to let him go, visitors will share Darwin’s anticipation and excitement as he gathers a few tools and begins his journey. A scale replica of the Beagle will help visitors imagine themselves aboard the ship with Darwin. They’ll follow him as he steps onto tropical shores and is overwhelmed by his first look at tropical plants and animals. And they’ll see what an earthquake in Chile and a trek in the Andes taught the budding scientist about the expanse and the power of geological time. Fossils played an important role in Darwin’s thinking, and visitors will see many here, including a touchable replica of the giant, armadillo-like glyptodont that gave him pause. Why, Darwin wondered, did extinct species disappear, to be replaced by similar species? The famous “Darwin finches” of the Galapagos Islands are here, of course, along with the mockingbirds that first aroused Darwin’s curiosity about the peculiar distribution of species on these islands. Visitors will discover just how these, along with many other plants and animals, gave Darwin food for thought and led to his first tentative speculations about the origin of new species. A Voyage of the Mind Back in London, Darwin began another voyage—this one inside his mind. It was here, in what he called his “transmutation” notebooks, that he began to realize that species of plants and animals are not static but change over time, and that all species are related through common ancestry. Visitors can see a replica of the first of these notebooks, open to Darwin’s sketch of a simple evolutionary tree accompanied by the words: “I think.” It would be many years, though, before Darwin made his thoughts public. “Darwin came back from his voyage knowing he was working on a staunchly materialistic theory,” says Olivier Rieppel. “But he was embedded in a culture that was very opposed to this, and he knew it would cause an uproar. So he was determined to keep his theory back until he had a very strong case.” That case became much stronger when Darwin read Thomas Malthus and realized that more animals were born than could survive: life was a constant competition for survival. Any animal with a competitive edge—a useful variation—was likely to live longer and leave more offspring, passing on the trait to the next generation. Darwin sketched out these ideas as early as 1842. In 1844, after he and his family had moved to Down House, in a tiny rural village outside London, Darwin wrote an essay on evolution by natural selection. Even then, though, he hid the manuscript under the stairs, with instructions to his wife to publish it after his death. Darwin lived and worked at Down House for forty years. The exhibition recreates his cozy, cluttered study—part library, part laboratory—with real artifacts, including his work table, notebooks, and scientific tools. Visitors can picture themselves walking with Darwin down his “sandwalk” path. And they’ll experience his shock upon receiving a letter from a young naturalist, Alfred Russel Wallace, describing a theory remarkably similar to his own. The two men agreed to have their papers presented together at the Linnaean Society in 1858, and Darwin finally rushed his book, The Origin of Species, into print the following year. Continue>>