The family took in a preview of the new exhibit at the Field Museum last week, and had a terrific time. “Darwin” is a thorough profile of the shaggy naturalist who laid the bedrock of modern biological science with his “On the Origin of Species.” I heartily endorse the show, which runs through January 1. You’ll come away with it with a new appreciation of how hard he worked at what he loved, and how his inescapable conclusions about evolution gave him incredible grief (weakened his own faith, threatened his marriage).
My favorite quote from his letters came from a missive sent during college to one of his favorite cousins and fellow bug-hunters: “I am dying by inches, from not having any body to talk to about insects”
I wrote a post about it for the Huffington Post, which you can find here. In it , I present a modest proposal (really modest, b/c I didn’t feel like belaboring the point) to airlift these types of exhibits to the American hinterlands and not-so-hinterlands where cretins believe that God created fossils and other evolutionary evidence just to confuse us and test our faith.
What’s with this stupid beanbag game I keep seeing? This weekend we drove by three different places where young guys were barbecuing and drinking beer on the stoop, and they all were tossing their beanbags at a piece of plywood with cut-out holes. (Except for a group near DePaul, who my wife pointed out were playing Toss-Across. The leaders of tomorrow apparently feel the need for the greater challenge of long-distance tic-tac-toe.) It’s starting to look like Romper Room with Leinenkugels out there.