Museum of Man

Last weekend we went to the San Diego Museum of Man. We haven't taken advantage of all the great museums here in Balboa Park since we moved here, and I felt like it was about time we did some exploring. Since we knew the Museum of Natural History would be swarming with people lined up to see the Dead Sea Scrolls, and I had heard lots of good things about the Museum of Man, we decided to give it a try.

We spent most of our time between the human evolution exhibit "Footsteps Through Time" and the Copper Age special exhibit. I thought they did a great job on the primate/hominid evolution part. It started off trying to get the concept of evolutionary time across by using beads to represent the span of 1 year. Think about how much change you've experienced in one year. Now think about 1,000 years - several strings of beads. Now think about 1 million years - a veritable wall of beads. Veritable. And if that didn't get the point across, another exhibit panel showed a cartoon of selection for and evolution of drug resistant bacteria. Again, time is the critical factor in evolution. Due to the short generation times for bacteria, we are able to observe the selection and establishment of new traits in bacterial populations within our own lifetimes. I thought they got the point across pretty clearly that, given enough time (and life on earth has had millions of years), the evolution of life as we know it could have happened without resorting to supernatural explanations.

I learned that the way Neandertals are generally depicted is incorrect: they were not stupid brutes. They had strong bodies and were well adapted to colder climates, but they also lived in societies that cared for the sick and the elderly, and buried their dead. It looks like we still don't know just why they performed burials - whether it was a sign of their spirituality or if they simply wanted to keep scavengers away from the bodies. At some point, the Neandertals were "replaced" by the Cro Magnon people. I don't know if the circumstances under which the "replacement" occurred has been satisfactorily resolved - if the Cro Magnon destroyed the Neandertals, outbred them, or if some other reason is at work. The museum did not go into any details on this curious facet of our evolution, but I did learn something perhaps equally mind-blowing. Contemporary humans are a single species - regardless of our color, nation of origin, customs, and beliefs, any human male can mate with any human female to produce viable offspring. This is the definition of a species. But at one point, there were five different hominid species simultaneously coexisting on planet earth.



http://www.globalchange.umich.edu/gctext/Inquiries/Inquiries_by_Unit/
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What if Homo sapiens sapiens wasn't the only species to make it to the present day? What if another species of intelligent humanoids was walking the earth today, with us? I don't know if this could have ever happened though, considering how we treat members of our own species, let alone creatures that are clearly not human. OK, I'll put the soap box away. But the mind-blowing part is that at one point during our evolution, we weren't alone.

At the end of the hominid evolution exhibit was a great set of exhibits on contemporary human life and the future. I think that an important part of being a scientist is interaction with and education of the public. This set of exhibits made me proud. I learned about cell structure, how DNA codes for all the information that makes us who we are, karyotyping, cell division, and reproduction. I thought these topics were clearly explained without dumbing it down or oversimplifying. Then there were exhibits on stem cell research, cyborgs, brain disorders, nanotechnology, and cloning. It turns out that lots of animals have been cloned besides Dolly the sheep, the first of which was a frog, in 1952! In addition to explaining each of these concepts in general, these exhibits included questions about the ethical considerations involved in their application. Like, do you want a bunch of nanomachines running rampant in your bloodstream? Or is this simply a Communist plot designed to pollute our precious bodily fluids?

I haven't even talked about the Copper Age exhibit, but this post is long enough. I hope you take the time to check out the links included in this post - good stuff.