Elf Sternberg

I had been ambivalent about the Lucy exhibit from the beginning. I was one of those people who signed the petition last year begging the University of Houston to cancel the Lucy tour on the grounds that Lucy was a research specimen too fragile and too rare to have wandering the world. I know that museum-quality shippers are the best in the business, but accidents happen. The petitioners (PZ Myers among them) have reversed themselves on any boycotts because the exhibition was doing so poorly we feared it would send a signal to museums around the world that science displays were not financially viable. So off we went.

After picking up Kouryou-chan from her dance class, the three of us (Yamaraashi-chan was at her mother's and had indicated she wasn't interested anyway) stopped for a quick teriyaki dinner and then off to the museum. The weather outside was very cold, and waiting in line for 15 minutes was an exercise in staying warm. The line was quite long, and the elderly gentleman in front of us joked about how Kouryou-chan was not much bigger than Lucy herself.

The Empire of Auxum

What they don't emphasize in much of the material is the deal made between the government of Ethiopia, which owns Lucy, and the University of Houston: in order to get Lucy into the exhibit, at least half the exhibit had to be on the history and culture of Ethiopia. This annoyed Omaha, but to tell the truth I was fascinated by it. I'd only barely ever heard of The Auxum Empire before, although contemporaries of it describe is being as large, as educated, and as influential over its region as Imperial China or Imperial Rome. Reading up on the history, I become even more impressed, so much so that I strongly suspect it has disappeared from the mainstream historical memory (when was the last The History Channel did a show on it?) because, in case we forgot, those people were black. (A search of Discovery.com shows that the only mentions of Auxum are in relation to their claim to have the original Ark of the Covenant. Paging Doctor Jones...)

Minor parenting fail

Kouryou-chan wandered through the exhibit with a sketchbook in hand, drawing what she could. I saw another woman in her mid-20s doing the same thing, and introduced her and Kouryou-chan. My intent was to validate to Kouryou-chan what she was doing; instead, she became distraught that her drawings weren't nearly as good. She kept at it with our encouragement, but some of the fire had gone out of her.

An interesting attribution

There was a section on the religions of Ethiopia, and one display caught my eye. It was a panel on Ge'ez, the written language of worship used through Ethiopia. The audio portion was from a university professor, but the image of a page of Ge'ez had this attribution on the bottom of it: Written Ge'ez sample provided by Wikipedia. That's an interesting attribution.

AD and BC vs. CE and BCE

As I walked through the section on Ethiopian Christianity, I heard three women talking, and one of them said "A lot of these say CE. Those back there said BCE. What does that mean?" I interrupted to explain that they meant "Common Era" and "Before the Common Era," and were the same as "AD" and "BC." Archaeologists use CE and BCE these days mostly because Jewish and Islamic antiquarians preferred the religiously neutral terms to the Christianity-oriented Anno Domini. "Oh," said one woman with a bit of a huff, "It's all just political correctness."

I couldn't disagree with her.

The Paleoanthropology part

We made our into the Paleoanthropology section. There was a woman from the center there with the unenviable task of explaining how morphology lets us understand and place the bones found during evolutionary history. The questions were coming from an older couple who didn't seem to grasp both the undirectness of the process and the sheer idea of deep time.

After hearing and reading a brief discussion of the methods of paleoanthropology, we walked up a broad, darkened ramp to the Lucy exhibit proper, and in the middle of the ramp, each under its own light, was a skull. Each skull was from a different ancestor, showing where we had pieces to fit into the puzzle and where we had reconstructed the skull from the best available evidence. The skull of Heidelbergensis was especially menacing with its almost human shape but for the emphasized, almost angry brow. Striation from the fossilization process made it seem even more dangerous.

We gots Hobbitses

At the midpoint of the ramp it turned back toward the secure room, and on the wall against the back of the landing was a display of the best tree of descent we had for genus Homo. I pointed to the display on the right and pointed out Homo florensis, telling Kouryou-chan "Those are Hobbits."

"They are?" she said, her eyes going wide. Omaha has been reading The Lord of the Rings aloud to Kouryou-chan for some weeks now. I explained that florensis was an offshoot of human descent that had died out half a million years ago, but the examples we had of them were short and stout, so the researchers nicknamed them "Hobbits." They weren't really, of course, but that was the nickname that had stuck.

The Lucy Room

We then went into the Lucy room. This was a round room with two guards in it to let you know they were serious about protecting her. Three-quarters of the wall had been dedicated to a massive mural showing humanity's slow emergence from primitive apes all the way up to H. sapiens. In the center a box held what remained of Lucy, and two upright reconstructions, one showing the bones in relative positions, the other a complete reconstruction showing a best-guess as to what Lucy might have looked like.

Kouryou-chan asked to be picked up so she could be toe-to-toe with Lucy. "She is smaller than I am!" she said, and immediately wrote that down.

A group of men had formed around the Lucy box itself, and were discussing the features that caused scientists to believe she stood upright. One they missed was the muscle grooves on the pelvis itself, which indicated that it was used for balancing and standing, not just for powered forward locomotion, as we find on a chimp. There was an animated display downstairs showing just that, and I even mimed the difference. "Must have missed that," the younger guy said. It was actually a fun kind of conversation.

There really isn't all that much to Lucy herself. A handful of bones reverently laid out in a box barely four feet long. They're fascinating in the way all very old things like this are fascinating, a glimpse of our past, but I needed a concrete, founded context it which to make sense of it all, and it was the surrounding materials, the explanations, the way evidence and conjecture fit together affirmatively, that made the whole display interesting. Not the bones themselves.

One of the things that makes as show like this fun is eavesdropping on other conversations. I listened to two women talking about the Lucy display and a friend of theirs whom they couldn't convince to come. "She's very religious," one said. "We were playing Apples-to-Apples, and when the greet card read 'Things That Don't Exist,' she put down 'Fossils.' I think... I think she knows they do exist, but she can't figure out how to fit God into that knowledge so she has to, I think, act like they don't."

One thing I liked most about the the "emergence of man" display was the way it worded the section on modern man. Written with a wry tone as if telling space aliens about us, it mentioned that Homo sapiens has occupied nearly its entire globe and may even sometimes be found in orbit. "This species," it went on to say, "has developed to the point where it has its own specialists, called paleonanthropologists, who look back on its history and attempt to discern its own past. It is the only species on Earth to do so." The last panel contained a mirror.

Kouryou-chan was exhausted, her feet aching and tired, by the time we got back to the car. It was already past her bedtime. All in all, the trip was completely worth the time and money.

I don't normally think of "masonry contractor" when I want someone to educate me on the finer points of biology, but a masonry contractor from Nevada is so concerned with what he sees as the "problems" with evolutionary theory that he doesn't want them debated: he wants the state constitution amended so that teachers would be required to tell students that "some scientists believe it is mathematically impossible that life could have emerged from naturalistic forces," that "nowhere in the fossil record is there found anything that could be described as a transitional fossil," and that "the origin of sex is so unlikely that biologists do not believe an adequate explanation for it will ever emerge."

All three of these are, basically, wrong. Yes, there are a few people with PhDs in economics, or engineering, or mathematics, who have stated that they don't believe that biological processes can emerge from purely chemical ones: suffice it to say that there's nothing biologists or chemists can point to that would agree with them. It is a failure of the imagination that these men suffer from: it seems so complicated they can't imagine how it happened. Well, biologists can.

There are thousands of transitional fossils. You and I are "transitional forms" between our ancestors and our progeny, and if we go far back enough our ancestors are shaped vastly different from ourselves; likewise, our progeny many generations down the line will be different from our current forms. The term "transitional fossil" is a creationist canard, not a term of biology.

The evolution of sex has long been one of contention, but that doesn't mean that it's so mysterious we can't make progress toward understanding it. A paper that appears in last week's issue of Science shows that in species with both asexual and sexual reproductive strategies, those populations where individuals mostly favored the asexual strategy tended to accumulate deleterious mutations faster than those that had sex. Sex, it turns out, is useful because the mixing and matching of genomes shuffles deleterious genes out of the gene pool faster-- fast enough to make the biochemical investment in sexual reproduction worthwhile to the population as a whole.

But Steve Brown doesn't care, and doesn't want to read "hard" science books. He wants his ignorance enshrined in the state constitution. And he wants Nevada's children to share that ignorance with him.