Devolution

Yesterday I learned that during the gubernatorial administration that was in control when my son was between 1 and 9 years old, the word “evolution” was not permitted in any displays or exhibits at the New York State Museum here in Albany.

Obviously I’m greatly disappointed by this, not simply because it happened but because I never noticed it, at least consciously. During these years we probably took Keenan here a hundred times. Very early on he managed to stuff a pacifier into the glassed-off portion of a New York City streetcar replica, where it remained for many months. We used to go and visit it. But did I ever notice any hastily whited-out wall space? Mismatched fonts? I cannot say that I did.

It’s true we didn’t spend much time engaging the written text in the museum during most of these years. But amongst all the quartzite and trilobites and palaeodictyopteroidea, surely I should have picked up on the absence of any unifying interpretation. To the extent anything was lacking, I just chalked it up to the general dullness of pre-Triassic earth, at least as seen through the eyes of a preschooler. New York only had one dinosaur fossil, and Coelophysis was merely a pre-dinosaur, as any five-year-old can tell you. Our rocks are just too old.

These were the years when the hypothesis that dinosaurs had feathers hit the mainstream, trickling down to cartoons and coloring books. Did the State Museum really have nothing at all to say about whether dinosaurs and birds were related? Or did they work around it with euphemisms? I know for certain they didn’t abandon deep geologic time – the various eras and epochs remained in the displays as they have since the museum’s founding nearly 200 years ago.

The good news is that Keenan did manage to learn all about evolution, from books and his parents <i>Walking with Dinosaurs</i> and <i>The Future is Wild</i>.

But I can’t believe I was naive enough to think this sort of thing only happened in faraway places like Texas.