Reflections on the Darwin exhibition
Now that I’ve returned home and a couple of days have passed, I think it only right and proper that I give a well-considered summary of the Natural History Museum’s Darwin exhibition. Here it is:
V E R Y G O O D I N D E E D !
If you get the chance to see it, you really should. The two highlights of the exhibition for me were getting to see Darwin’s original Red Notebook in the flesh, so to speak, and being shown the original Galápagos mockingbird specimens which first set Darwin to wondering about evolution by the Beagle Project‘s Karen James, who has recently been working with these very specimens.
The potentially embarrassing moment of the evening came when I seized the opportunity (over mulled wine) to ask a snail expert working for the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature a question which has been bothering me for over six years now: why are there are so few snails in my garden? It hadn’t occurred to me that there are an awful lot of snails in the world, and that this particular expert might specialise in those from another part of it (like the African rift lakes, for example).
Still, I think I got away with it.
The Red Notebook is the blog of 
