The Creation “Museum” makes it to the peer-reviewed literature

I’m afraid I don’t have access to this specialty journal, Curator: The Museum Journal, so it’s a good thing the author sent me a copy of his article on the modern treatment of human origins in museums. It’s amusing, since part of it is a substantial comparison of the exhibits at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and the Smithsonian in Washington DC, but there is also a thorough discussion of Ken Ham’s Creation “Museum” in Kentucky. The Creation Museum does not come off at all well.

Asma highlights a couple of things that leapt out to me, as well. It’s not really a museum — there’s no opportunity to explore or think, you’re given a script to follow and you may not deviate.

When I visited, I discovered no way to break off the tour at any point prior to Consummation. About two hours in, I started to get claustrophobic; the spaces seemed to get tighter and darker as I walked the eschatological narrative. I decided to step away–just as racism and crime were being blamed on Eve’s taste for forbidden fruit. I tried to find an exit to the cafeteria (“Noah’s Cafe”) so I might nourish my weakening spirit. To my horror, I discovered that one cannot actually exit anywhere along the pathway. The herding is so absolute that when you attempt to backtrack, you find that the doors you’ve been entering have no handles on the opposite side. Like someone in a haunted house, you must complete the entire circuit.

The other striking thing about it is that it is an empty shell, a hollow façade. Go to any other respectable museum in the country, such as the Science Museum of Minnesota (which does have a bit of a pop-science, entertainment quality to it), and you can find extensive collections and research facilities behind it. The part that most people visit is the public relations side, with nicely laid out exhibits and explanatory material and hands-on elements. Behind the scenes, you’ll find large rooms with shelves everywhere and buckets and barrels and crates full of specimens, the smell of formaldehyde and alcohol, and spaces full of beetle larvae gnawing away at carcasses. Not at the Creation “Museum”, though!

It’s not quite accurate to call this evangelical center a “museum.” It contains almost no “information,” unless you count as information speculations on how Noah kept dinosaurs on the ark. It offers no new observations about nature, unless you think that inferring a Designer can be called observational. Unlike most other nature museums, it has no “research” component whatsoever. When I asked Mark Looy, vice president for AiG ministry relations, where the research labs and archive collections were located, he confessed that he didn’t understand the question. “This is a museum,” he finally said, chuckling.

That’s revealing. These people don’t even know what a real museum is.

When you finally spill out of this ball of confusion into the gigantic gift shop, you become keenly aware of the unholy mixing of piety and profit. Someone is making a fortune on this stuff. The museum speaks directly to the anxieties of a fearful subculture that sees its family values under attack by a rising secular tide. The visitors at the Creation Museum feel like David, facing the secular giant Goliath. They see themselves as underdogs of righteousness who’ve chosen an origin story that’s different from the science story. Like bad reality television that drives up ratings with violent and abusive scenarios, the museum drives up profits by demonizing science. The search for meaningful origin stories is understandable, of course, but the museum’s suggestion that science causes nihilism and racism is inexcusable.

It’s actually a relief when the paper leaves the Creation “Museum” and focuses on comparing the AMNH and Smithsonian. Both are great museums, and even more glorious in contrast to that silly place in Kentucky. Asma does mention one failing of the AMNH — it made me happy to see that someone else noticed.

Near the end of the Spitzer Hall, a video kiosk presenting near-life-sized images of science administrator Ken Miller, Catholic biologist Eugenie Scott, and geneticist Francis Collins, waxes philosophical about evolution and faith. Collins, a “theistic evolutionist” who founded an organization called BioLogos in 2007 to explore religion-and-science intersections, offers most of the edifying reflections. Collins has since moved on to be the director of the National Institutes of Health–he was nominated by President Obama–but the AMNH is clearly happy to present his theory that religion and science are allies. The atheist new-guard–Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris, for instance–is not invited to convey its message of religion-and-science incompatibility. The AMNH wants to reassure and accommodate visitors. The kiosk video feels like a bit of a sop, however: tacked on the end of an otherwise strong exhibition in order to pacify a specific visitor contingent.

The Smithsonian, by contrast, seems to avoid this careful placating, sensitive tiptoeing, and accommodating consideration. Refreshingly, the David H. Koch Hall of Human Origins does not treat the visitor with kid gloves. The curators do not seem nervous about evangelical blowback. They don’t waste time and space repeatedly reassuring visitors with plaques and videos about the dignity of everyone’s diverse cultural beliefs.

Asma also does mention the message of these respectable museums — they actually do have a moral, even in these sections on human evolution, and it’s ecological. Creationism is over, don’t you know.

The developers of these new exhibitions worked to engage the emotions of visitors: their hearts as well as their heads. Of course, no contemporary museum is complete without a cautionary morality tale at the end, and both the AMNH and Smithsonian follow form. In the 1940s and 1950s, museum directors like Albert Eide Parr at the AMNH began to redirect their giant institutional “arks” toward the new mission of ecology education and research. In 1943, for example, Parr begged an esteemed group of curators at the Field Museum to follow his lead and focus the new museum message on local ecology rather than exotic safari-type entertainment. And besides, he argued, the old mission of educating citizens about evolution had been
successfully accomplished. That’s right– curators in the 1950s believed that evolution theory was now firmly entrenched in the common sense of mainstream America. The irony is delicious. Dim the lights, cue the diorama of Ken Ham’s evangelical anti-Darwin displays, and watch the rapid spinning of Albert Parr in his grave.

But Parr’s message has been rekindled by the recent mainstreaming of the environmental movement. Museums keenly feel the responsibility of eco-ethics. To that end, both museums stress the way that humans–uniquely, among our evolved animal brethren–can significantly transform our environment. We have become ecological niche-makers. This brings new drama to our consideration of the future. Both exhibitions educate us about the facts: the earth is getting warmer, habitats and species are disappearing, natural resources are depleting, populations are rising beyond sustainable levels, and so on. But both exhibitions resist the heavy-handed doom-and-gloom approach, and give us instead some more nuanced glimpses into our possible future. The AMNH presents an optimistic response to the apocalyptic characterization that sometimes colors eco-ethics. We are encouraged to learn that “humans have an extraordinary capacity to improve the future. Given the wondrous achievements in human history, from the wheel to computers and spacecraft, our potential for advances in art, science and technology is incalculable. By taking an active role in transforming our world and ourselves, we will affect our destiny, for better or worse.”

I think that’s appropriate. Creationism really is a freakishly weird fringe belief that is inconsistent internally and with the evidence, and needs to be dealt with with ridicule and laughter, which isn’t exactly what museums are good at. Our prospects for the future are a serious matter that can be discussed rationally, and museums — the real ones, that is, not the “museums” — are well equipped for that.

Asma ST (2011) Risen Apes and Fallen Angels: The New Museology of Human Origins. Curator: 54(2): 141-163.

It was awfully nice of him not to demand my immediate arrest

R. Joseph Hoffmann really doesn’t get it. He’s written an article that is basically doing nothing but decrying blasphemy on some very strange grounds: that it’s stupid and pointless and cowardly. He also compares me and the desecration of a cracker with Terry Jones and the burning of a Koran that led to riots in Afghanistan, differentiating between the two of us in that I was just a petty grandstander, while Terry Jones’ intent was to purposely fire up Muslims into violence, and therefore Terry Jones “needs to be charged with and convicted of murder”.

Well. I guess the trial would be only a token formality if Hoffmann had his way — he’s calling for a conviction already.

I am put in a weird position. The purpose of his essay is to contrast Myers and Jones: I am merely a stupid, shallow showman, while Jones is an actively evil thug, and therefore, Myers can be dismissed while Jones must be arrested for murder. I suppose I should be grateful that I’m not going to have charges brought up against me, but again, Hoffmann misses the point.

Let us grant Mr Hoffmann the full weight of his characterization. Imagine (it’s easy if you try) that I’m some capering fool, posturing annoyingly from my remote, secure, isolated fastness in the godless fortress of Morris, Minnesota, surrounded by 5000 atheist fanatics (I shall call them…my athassins!). I am completely safe, since there isn’t a single religious person anywhere in Minnesota who has any clout with the university board of trustees or the local gun club, and I am free to give religion the raspberry, which I do. Let us also assume that Terry Jones is a brilliant evil mastermind who has devised a nefarious plan to destroy the entire Muslim world with an elaborate sympathetic magic ritual in Florida, inflaming the passions of devout Muslims far beyond anything mere Predator drones and bombs can do, and setting them to commit an orgy of violence which, so far, seems to mainly have led to the death of UN peacekeeping forces, rather than any Muslims.

So yes, let us assume that we are both, in different ways, malign feces-flinging subhumans, a clown and a monster.

In what way does this rationalize the Catholic and Muslim reactions? Hoffmann is straining mightily to turn all the focus on a jerk and a hate-monger, while neglecting the actual results of religion’s actions: that some people are so dedicated to their delusional superstitions that they will threaten or even commit violence at slight provocation. We live in a world where some Catholics will froth at the mouth and send death-threats and call for people to be fired over insults to a scrap of magic, holy bread; we live in a world where some Muslims will kill random people if someone insults their magic, holy book. That ought to be recognized as the real problem and a call for more criticism, not less, of religion, yet what is Hoffmann’s desired solution? Lock up the transgressor in Florida for the murders in Afghanistan.

I don’t much like Terry Jones — he’s just another religious fanatic — but it seems rather illiberal and self-destructive to start imprisoning critics of religion because ignorant mobs might indulge in religiously-motivated violence in response. Personally, Hoffmann has left me off the hook this time, but that could change: if an outraged Catholic had retaliated against my cracker offense by shooting a nearby Unitarian, Hoffmann-logic would make me guilty of murder. In a world ruled by Hoffmann-logic, martyrs for the faith would get a two-fer: kill an atheist, and then blame another atheist for incitement. And then, as a bonus, the killer’s actions would be excused as justifiable homicide.

Shades of gray

Sometimes, issues demand nuance. This is a complicated world and there are a great many subjects that simply aren’t reducible to binaries — we do a disservice to the subtleties when we discard them in favor of absolutes. And often I can agree that we need depth and breadth of understanding if we’re to navigate a difficult situation.

But sometimes the issues are black and white. Sometimes the answers are clear and absolute. And in those cases, attempts to bring out the watercolors and soften the story by blurring the edges do a disservice to reality. There are places where there are no ambiguities, and the only appropriate response is flat condemnation. And we witness them every day.

All around the world, people are killing and being killed; they are crossing the clearest, least arbitrary border we have. You don’t come back from death, and you can’t atone for extinguishing another life. There are no excuses. Life is not a video game, where your targets are smears of pixels with no history and no awareness. In the real world, those bodies are people, with 20 years or 30 years or 50 years or 70 years of stories and connections behind them, part of a web of humanity, and their every action tugs on the people around them. Dehumanizing them, as we often do, dehumanizes us. You are the killer, but you are also the killed.

  • …the enemy walks down the road, a distant figure in the sights of your rifle. You squeeze the trigger, there is a sharp report, and bam, the enemy is smashed backwards like a cheap tin target in the penny arcade, and a red mist slowly settles over his still form. You trot forward and look; a clean kill, the bullet went through the left eye and blew out the entire back of the skull, brains and blood are sprayed for yards behind the target, the face is a ghastly ruin of slumping flesh on the shattered armature of the skull.

    …you are walking down the road, anxious to be home since there are reports of the enemy lurking in the neighborhood, but still thinking ahead to mundane concerns, like what you’ll have for dinner or what the family has been doing while you were away, when…nothing. You suddenly cease to exist, without warning, without awareness, just abruptly, you are no more.

    Hours later, friends find your body and carry it home, and stretch it out on the table. On the wall above it is your wedding portrait. Your partner clutches your rigid hand, the flesh like cold clay, and looks at the portrait, and looks at the wreckage of your beloved face, and knows there will be nightmares, and that every happy memory will always be overlaid with the horror of this moment.

  • …you watch the crowd fill the streets, and when the numbers seem adequate, you tap the numbers into your cell phone, and instantly the car blooms into a flare of fire, and as you watch the bodies fly and flail away from it, you hear the rumbling thud of the detonation. You rush forward with everyone else — it wouldn’t do to be spotted guiltily scuttling away — and you see one of the enemy lying in the road, eyes blinking in shock, staring at the sky. You watch the lips move, but no sound emerges — you know the shock wave of the explosion would have pulped lungs that now lie in sodden useless tatters in the chest. The target tries to cough, spasms, blood gushes from mouth and nose, and then the feeble movements end, and the eyes glaze, seeing nothing ever again.

    …you join friends as you walk to the market, when a great hand lifts you and flings you against a wall and bounces you into the street. You can’t hear anything but an overwhelming ringing; you feel disoriented and confused; something is wrong with your body, it feels weak and helpless. You look up at the sky, it’s clear and blue and beautiful, and you dream that your mother will come and pick you up and all will be well, so you try to call out to her, but you can’t catch your breath, and all you feel is a vast welling bubble of pain rising up and up and breaking…and then darkness.

    Your mother arrives later, with people from all around the neighborhood. They file through the makeshift morgue, sorting through the bloody clothing and the shattered body parts, trudging through a charnel house to identify their loved ones, or fragments of them. One of the attendants has washed the blood and dust from your face and, unlike so many others, you look like one sleeping — your mother hopefully puts a hand to your cheek, feels the chilled motionlessness, and knows there is no hope ever again, and feels a shadow of that rising bubble of anguish herself.

  • …the enemy walks into the shop, and from your hiding place, you paint the wall of the building with your laser. Your headset whispers; the pilot of the plane flying invisibly distant, far above you, acknowledges the signal and calmly informs you that the package is inbound. Moments later, there is a streak of light from the sky and a thunderclap of sound and fire and dust and smoke, and the building vanishes, becoming a shallow hole in the ground surrounded by a corona of rubble.

    …you open the door and walk into the room, greeting your friends, when, in an instant, you are vaporized, your flesh so thoroughly churned in the violence of the explosion that all that will remain are small clumps of blood and dust sown across the landscape. No recognizable trace will ever be recovered.

    All your children will know is that one day their parent left them, abandoned them, disappeared somehow in the diffuse chaos and instability that is their life. They shall inherit anger and a sense of betrayal, but remember little else about you.

  • …you are part of the mob. How dare they insult your people! Your fury rages, and together you grab sticks and stones and knives and you surge to their home, where the guards stand surprised and frightened by the spontaneous rush of howling people. You overwhelm them. You stand over one, stomp on an exposed arm, and see it bend and break; you pick up a rock, kneel down, and see the enemy’s face, hear the screams of pain and terror, smell the shit and blood as the enemy’s guts are spilled on the dirt, and raise that rock and smash and smash and smash. The body is dead, but everyone continues to tear at it, ripping scraps of smeared clothing and even souvenirs of flesh and passing them back to the crowd behind them, where they are waved like bloody flags.

    …you stand momentarily as the mob charges, torn between duty and fear, and then you try to break and run …but too late. There are too many to fight, they batter you everywhere, you can’t think — all you know is agony and horror and you feel fingers tearing at your eyes and your limbs breaking and the sharp tearing of knives and finally numbing, crushing blows to the skull, and then you’re dead. But the mob doesn’t stop, and continues to rend and mutilate.

    Your body is sent home in a sealed coffin. There is a decorous funeral, the words are solemnly said, the family weeps. In the somber procession, though, suddenly your father drops to his knees, broken. He remembers the laughing child he carried on his shoulders, and he can’t reconcile that moment with this one. He wants to know what happened, but he can’t know. He wants to have helped, but he is helpless. And there is no way to overcome this grief.

I know what it is like to lose someone you love, and it’s a pain so great that I can’t imagine reaching out to cause that pain in anyone else; what killers must do is blind themselves to the enormity of their act and wall themselves off from the empathy that all human beings should have. They also must bury that portion of their mind that can sympathize with their victims in an avalanche of pretexts, these excuses that later apologists will call “nuance”, or “shades of gray”, or “complications”. And they will dredge up the familiar roll call of empty ghosts to water down the evil of what is done. They will call it God. Country. Honor. Justice. Revenge. The priests and the mullahs and the politicians and the generals are experts at softening the contrast and blurring the edges and persuading one person that that other person over there, so much like you in every way that matters, deserves to have everything important extinguished and brutalized and disregarded.

They are so damned good at it that they can stir up the killing frenzy over anything at all. A gang of fanatics, driven by superstition and ethnic bigotry, kill thousands in a terrorist attack in one country. So zealots stir up their own froth of superstition and ethnic bigotry, and convince the targeted country to attack and kill people of yet another country that had nothing to do with the terrorist attack. What a waste of lives, yet everyone on both sides is smug and confident that the deaths on the other side were warranted.

Or even more ridiculously remote: one side takes such extreme offense at the lack of reverence shown by a few people on the other side towards some copy of a sacred object, that they then slaughter unrelated targets.

Stirred up by three angry mullahs who urged them to avenge the burning of a Koran at a Florida church, thousands of protesters on Friday overran the compound of the United Nations in this northern Afghan city, killing at least 12 people, Afghan and United Nations officials said.

…

Unable to find Americans on whom to vent their anger, the mob turned instead on the next-best symbol of Western intrusion — the nearby United Nations headquarters. “Some of our colleagues were just hunted down,” said a spokesman for the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, Kieran Dwyer, in confirming the attack.

These twelve people were human beings, reduced to a statistic in a newspaper article, and dehumanized and exterminated by a mindless mob, inflamed by religious fanatics. Similarly, the hundred thousand or more killed in Iraq, the ongoing war in Afghanistan, all of these are also genuine, thinking, feeling human beings, wiped out in a cold-hearted calculus of delusion and greed. There is no justification sufficient for these acts.

Yet somehow we get lost in the wrong questions. Do we have the right to burn the Koran? Is it unreasonable to think that Afghans might have cause to be angry? Should we not defend the right of fascist politicians to live, and perhaps it is OK to grant a limited license to murder to certain people if they are of the correct political stripe or the appropriate faith? Shall we weigh the sins of a Florida preacher against those of three Afghan clerics, and come up with a number that will tell us which is the greater offender, and by how much?

I’m an extremist in this debate, I will freely confess. I hold an absolute view that no killing is ever justified, that individuals have the necessity to defend themselves against assailants, but that even that does not grant moral approval to snuffing out the life of another. Don’t even try to pull out a scale and toss a copy of the Koran on one side and the life of a single human being on the other — the comparison is obscene. Do not try to tell me that some people are ‘moderates’ when they tolerate or even support and applaud war and death and murder for any cause, whether it is oil, or getting even, or defending the honor of wood pulp and ink.

The bone is bleached white. The flesh is burnt black. The blood splashes scarlet. You can’t render it in grays and pastels without losing sight of the truth.

Trust no one!

The beans have been spilled. I lied. I am not the Digital Cuttlefish, I am not leaving Scienceblogs, I have no talent for poetry, and I am not a nice person.

I am highly untrustworthy, though. I had people asking all day if I was really in Elmhurst and if I was really going to the local pub last night. I’m a little worried that I’ll get home to find the wife has changed the locks on me.

So pregnancy means a total surrender of autonomy?

This is how to handle a depressed person:

On December 23, 2010, Shuai, a 34-year-old pregnant woman who was suffering from a major depressive disorder, attempted to take her own life. Friends found her in time and persuaded her to get help. Six days later, Shuai underwent cesarean surgery and delivered a premature newborn girl who, tragically, died four days later.


On March 14, 2011, Shuai was arrested, jailed, and charged with murder and attempted feticide.

Don’t get pregnant, ladies! It means that every risk you might take becomes a criminal offense! I always thought it was a joke to criminalize suicide, too, but here’s a case where they’re actually prosecuting a woman for the crime.

Next up: every time you kick a man in the balls, you are a mass-murderer.

Elmhurst today!

Rats, I didn’t realize what day it is, and now no one is going to believe the announcement I just made is real…at least not until the 2nd rolls around and the persistence of reality sinks in. So I guess I better post stuff here, just for today, since no one is going to switch their feeds around just yet.

Anyway, I’m in Illinois, at Elmhurst College! Some people were asking for the details: I’ll be speaking at 4pm in Illinois Hall, the auditorium in the science building on campus. It’s an open lecture, feel free to show up.

I currently have no specific plans for the evening afterwards. If any locals want to make suggestions, do so in the comments. I’m easily swayed, so if you can’t make it to the talk, maybe we can get together afterwards.

In which I reveal my secret identity and announce a radical change

Three and a half years is a pretty decent lifespan for a cuttlefish.

The Cuttlefish Poet started out as a joke. I had posted about Cephalopod
Awareness Days, including a cephalopod poetry contest, and just for
fun, added a handful. I have my reputation to think of, so a quick
nom de tentacle change was required. I honestly thought that would be
the end of it.

But then, Gary Aldridge made the news, and in the ensuing respectful,
solemn thread, I was struck with a rhyme. So… why not let
“Cuttlefish” make another appearance? So he did. This time, though,
the reaction was overwhelmingly positive, with just enough “that’s
inappropriate” to convince me to put it up as its own post.

I am strong, but I am not immune to public reaction. It was fun being
“Cuttlefish”, at least at first. The very first month commenting
“he/she” won a Molly! I had to start another blog for Cuttlefish,
just to keep my thoughts straight. I don’t update it nearly as often
as Pharyngula, so it’s not a great time-sink. And little or no
editing takes place—if I like a comment Cuttlefish makes on
Pharyngula, I post it on the Cuttle blog; if not, I can just let it
stay and get buried in other comments.

There were some close calls. A few people did guess, but their
guesses were either buried in comments, or on their own blogs with
very few readers. Sometimes “his” comments came altogether too
quickly after my blog post, and I worried that it would be too
obvious. After a while, though, I started toying with that, making
Cuttlefish appear nearly psychic. The biggest benefit to this, of
course, was seeing how this intimidated Truth Machine.

It has been fun, but now my own book is coming out, and well, three
and a half years is a good long life for a cuttlefish. And as you know, we’ve had a few problems here at Scienceblogs, which have led to a little dissatisfaction with the current digs…but hey! I’ve already got this other blog where I’m comfortable, so I’ve decided to just up and move wholesale from scienceblogs to digitalcuttlefish.blogspot.com. If I do any
more rhyming there, it will be under my own name, but otherwise, look for new material to appear at the Digital Cuttlefish from now on.