Darwin: The Evolution Revolution

The family and I all finally went down to the Royal Ontario Museum yesterday to take in their Darwin: The Evolution Revolution exhibit.

Overall, the exhibit was fantastic. We all enjoyed it tremendously, especially the two science fans among us. Even the no-so-enthusiastic science fans thought it was great. It's odd, because I've seen quite a few fairly harsh criticisms of the show online in various places -- mostly saying that it was too long and wordy and boring. Yes, it is a bit heavy on the reading rather than the "experiencing" we would expect from a grade-school oriented science centre exhibit, but that's completely natural. It is an exhibit aimed at adults rather than kids and we would expect adults to be able to deal with a more intellectually demanding experience that 8 year olds. In fact, if you have younger kids, do not take them to this exhibit. I would say about 11 or 12 is the minimum age to be able to really appreciate the experience, preferably even 14 or 15. My 12 year old enjoyed it but found it a bit long. My 15 year old just loved it.

Like I said, it is a bit long -- you need to give yourself 90 to 120 minutes to really absorb the contents and it would definitely repay a second visit. You could manage in 60 minutes but would have to skim a bit. We did it in about 90-100 minutes and it worked out pretty well. We also dropped by the tremendously improved dinosaur galleries afterwards before leaving.

Did I find anything disappointing? Yes. The gift shop. Now I'm not a big fan of shoving gift shops down the throats of visitors as they leave an exhibit but if there was any case where I was positively disposed to picking something up, this was it. The Darwin shop was fairly small and mostly concentrated on trinkets and little doodads, most too cute and/or overpriced. What few books they did have seemed rather randomly selected. For example, they had volume II of the Janet Browne set but not volume I. And that in hardcover rather than paperback. Considering how directly the exhibit is aimed at countering creationism, I was surprised that they didn't have more instructional books on evolution or any of the recent spate of anti-creationism books. The only one they did have was Shermer's Why Darwin Matters. Also I was quite disappointed in their lack of tshirts or other clothing. And not one DVD of any of the recent Darwin/evolution series.