Kinetic City’s “Nowhere To Hide” Plays Role in Major New Darwin Exhibition

A playful exercise from AAAS’s Kinetic City science program is featured in an ambitious new exhibit on the life and work of biologist Charles Darwin at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.

The exhibit is being billed as the biggest ever on the explorer and researcher regarded as the father of evolution science, and will include some of Darwin’s tools, fossil specimens he collected and a reconstruction of his study in England. It will also include “Nowhere to Hide,” part of the Kinetic City online lesson on natural selection and evolution.

“Nowhere to Hide” explores how insects evolve as a means of adapting to and thriving in their environment.

Bob Hirshon, director of the award-winning Kinetic City after-school program, calls it a “nice, elegant example of how a population can change because of predators.”

At his office in Washington, D.C., Hirshon recently guided a visitor through the exercise: It opens with a view into an animated cluster of green leaves. Two bugs appear — one green and one orange — and begin to crawl among the leaves. Within a few seconds, they begin to reproduce. Then some hungry black birds come into the scene. Because the orange bugs are more visible among the green leaves, a greater proportion of them is eaten. Soon, almost all the bugs are green, as are most of their offspring.

Hirshon clicked an on-screen lever and slowly shifted the color of the leaves to orange. “Now it’s going to change — you never know, but it should change to mostly orange bugs,” he explained. When his prediction was quickly born out, he added: “It’s just like real life. And as more bugs come, more birds come to eat them, and that’s just like real life, too.”

Developed with major funding from the National Science Foundation's Informal Science Education Program, Kinetic City debuted in 1994 as a children's radio drama. Two years later it won a Peabody Award. Today, Kinetic City is geared more to informal after-school classroom settings and to the Internet. The guiding principle is that science, when taught through hands-on exercises, online games, creative writing, art and physical education, is fun. The materials are based on the AAAS Project 2061 Benchmarks for Science Literacy.

In the Museum of Natural History’s exhibit, “Nowhere to Hide” will be shown on two video monitors, with explanatory placards alongside.

The Darwin exhibition is the latest in a series the museum has done on great thinkers, explorers and scientists. It comes at time when evolution is at the center of an American controversy with a host of religious, cultural, educational and political implications.

While most mainstream religious leaders and science groups say there is no inherent conflict between religion and evolution, proponents of a faith-based doctrine called “intelligent design” say that the extraordinary complexity of life is possible only with the guiding hand of a creator. Most scientists say that evolution is the best way to explain the origin of humanity, and they see it as the cornerstone of modern biology, but polls show that roughly half of Americans don’t believe in it.

Christopher Raxworthy, the museum’s associate dean of science for education and exhibitions, said work on the exhibit began three years ago. He said it has two principal goals: To portray Darwin’s life as an “incredibly productive influence” on biologists, and to demonstrate how his work caused “a major paradigm shift” in our understanding of life.

“We really want this exhibit to portray the importance of evolution to modern biology,” Raxworthy said. “And we want the public to understand what evolution is.”

Michael Cosaboom, manager of interactive exhibits in the museum’s Department of Exhibition, said the organizers found “Nowhere to Hide” when they were using Google to search the Internet for existing media related to Darwin and evolution.

“The simplicity of the presentation, child-friendly graphics and ease of use were what made us want to use the piece,” Cosaboom said. “It appeals to us that it's not a game, but has game-like visuals…. It’s a piece that will appeal to young kids, and that hopefully the adults who bring them to the museum will use as a conversation starter.”

The Darwin exhibit will run at the American Museum of Natural History from 19 November through 29 May 2006. After Darwin closes in New York, the exhibit will travel to four other museums that collaborated in organizing it: the Museum of Science in Boston; The Field Museum in Chicago; the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, Canada; and the Natural History Museum in London.

For tickets and other information, see the museum’s Web site.

Edward W. Lempinen

21 November 2005