i.
My old professor, the cultural anthropologist W. Arens, used to say that "textbooks are the cemetaries are ideas." If you asked him what he thought about encyclopedias he would say they're the "mausoleums of ideas" and if you asked him what he thought of cultural museums, like the Smithsonian or the American Museum of Natural History, he would say we should "blow them all up."

To him, museums are a reservoir of racist, ethnocentric, mythology. Attend a clan meeting, and the racism is obvious, it punctures, it slaps you in the face. But visit a museum and the racism, the lies, and the mythology are subtle, they nuzzle under your face, they waft into your nostrils.

Catch the plague and you regurgitate your stomach in a matter of hours. Run to hospital and be cured. Develop cancer and you'll be sick for months without knowing it.

Even though I enjoy the AMNH on an aesthetic level, and let's not forget the planetarium and the dinosaur fossils, I've always agreed that Arens is right. The human aspects of the museum are racist.

The grand entrance of the human wings greets you with a naked savage offering Peter Stuyvestant a bounty of cumquats.

Further into the exhibit of man, you'll find a Polynesian woman topless for no apparent reason other than, perhaps, they don't think Polynesian women in museums to be either "naked" or "topless" the same way a gorilla or a chimp can't be "naked" or "topless."

Of course, I can't mention the AMNH without the totem masks of the Pacific people of Northwest America.

Take these exhibits in aggregate and one learns this is what "foreign" people are to us Americans, supposedly the world's most cosmopolitan population, here, in the planet's capitol: a curiosity.

How am I sure these exhibits are racist? Because I tested them with my cultural litmus paper: If you do it to black people, will they be outraged?

Take a museum exhibit of modern human behavior and display a black teenager being initiated to a gang. (I choose this example because it is not unlike any traditional coming of age ritual a cultural anthropologist would study.) Though not representative of their entire population, some individual black people have participated in this ceremony.

What do you think about that?

If a vignette like was installed at the AMNH, how long before Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson called Congress demanding they shut down the museum's funding?

We don't currently hear the same discourse, is not that the people on display aren't upset, but that they have no voice. They are trees being cut down in the forest and with no Lorax to speak for them. That doesn't make cutting down trees or putting people on display right, it only makes it possible.

A silent crime is no less a crime. A silent victim no less a victim. And a silent perpetrator no less a criminal.


ii. 
As I walk through the grand entrance of the AMNH's new wing on Human Origins, I am greeted by three skeletons: a chimpanzee, a human, and I'm happy to report, an extinct hominid I instantly recognized as a Neanderthal. Then again, identifying a Neanderthal is easy: outwards ribs for a thicker trunk as an adaptation to cold weather, a serious case of brow ridge, and an occipital bun.

Even a little kid can identify a Neanderthal skeleton.

And then I look at the human and Neanderthal pelvises, and I'm not a hundred percent positive because I didn't actually feel the skeleton up, but both the human and the Neanderthals are male.

Of course they are, what else would they be?

Remember the evolution drawings, where from left to right, we move from fish to amphibian to monkey to early hominid to human?

It's always men in these pictures. By implication, it's always men that are the standards we've been evolving to.

Right there, a little bit of cancer.

What kind of animal are humans?

We're mammals.

How do you define mammals?  As a species that gives birth and then nurses live young.

Do men give birth? Do men nurse live young?

No, women do. So the species is taxonomically defined by the females, who are considered, in terms of cultural symbolism, closer to nature. More animal. While men are considered, by the same standards, as more cultural and refined.

Why would evolution diagrams associate males with this natural process? Because, of course, it implies that the purpose of existence is to introduce men to the universe.

Women are an afterthought. In fact, they were invented specifically because a man was bored.

"Hey god, how about a little action down here?"

"Sure, Adam, let me borrow a rib."

"Awesome, by the way, I need someone I can blame everything on."

"Yeah, just blame everything on this one, also. Also, call her Eve. It's two for the price of one."


iii.
Like God, I am white. I'm not white, per se, but my skin is much lighter than other people's skin. My skin is actually sort of peachy. And my people aren't particularly white, they're sort of olive-ish.

But as a "racial" category in America, I'm white.

My skin is lighter than others because my ancestors come from a Northern region of the world we now call Europe.

When our ancestors moved out of Africa to the Northern territories where there is less direct sunlight, it was more beneficial to lose the defense of dark skin and gain the benefit of lighter skin which absorbs Vitamin D more efficiently. People that live closer to the equator have darker skin to protect themselves from UV radiation.

So Europe is light skin, Africa is dark, and in between Europe and Africa is in between light and dark, the color more associated with Arab people.

There aren't that many famous Arab people in America, especially since the most famous Arab nobody actually realizes is Arab. Of course, I'm talking about Jesus.

If you examine what people from the Bethlehem region look like, it's dark, curly hair, dark eyes, and tan skin. If you look at what Jesus looks like in most paintings of him, it's white skin, blonde hair, and blue eyes.

Many cultural critics have noticed this over recent years and assigned it to racism. Yeah, sure, but that's just religion. I'm not concerned that religions are racist. By nature, religions, especially the major ones, are supposed to be racist (or ethnocentric or at least condescending.)

But science shouldn't be racist. Science should be the dynamite that blows racism up into a million pieces.

Let's go back to that evolution image: The fish, the amphibian, the monkey, the early hominid, and then the human being.

Human beings evolved in East Africa. Their skin was dark because the melanin protects from UV radiation. The first humans are what we now call "black."

The fish, the amphibian, the monkey, the early hominid, and then the first human being: A WHITE GUY!

What the hell?

Here's some evolution trivia: When were white people invented?

Answer: Only about fifty thousand years ago when humans first left Africa. (The only white Homo is existence up until then were Neanderthals.)

Before that time? No white people.

And yet, view any of those diagrams (which, admittedly, are bullshit themselves) and it makes it seem like fish were invented to one day become white men.


iv.
What makes the fish-to-man picture such rank mythology is that it implies that evolution is a process that is concerned with progress. This falsehood is so pervasive that the current usage of the word "evolve" is to express a change that leads to an improvement.

Evolve, in some senses, is now synonymous with "mature." Evolve is used to mean to "ripen."

But evolution in the scientific sense isn't about progress. It's not about maturing or changing. It's about vehicles being built by design information for the purpose of replicating that design information out-competing for survival and reproduction other such organisms.

We haven't been building to human beings over three million years of life. Every second, an organism is fighting for survival. It has no long-term, future plans about what it wants its great, great, great, great, great, children to become.

Chimps, for instance, aren't hanging out in the jungle wondering how they're going to become human. And becoming human hasn't made us exempt from evolution. We haven't stopped fighting for survival anymore than we've stopped dying.

That's why it's completely wrong of the AMNH to use the term "lower" and "upper" primates. To say that a lemur is a "lower" primate is to imply inferiority. It is to imply that, as a species, it has more evolving to do.
As if it were thinking, "OK, pretty good, but let's get some more opposable thumb action going on here."

There's nothing wrong with a lemur. It's great at being a lemur. A lemur doesn't wish it was a monkey, a member of the so-called "upper" primate class. A lemur is just fine being a lemur.

A monkey isn't proud it's better than a lemur, and it doesn't feel bad that it's not as advanced as a human.

It's a damn monkey and the reason that we know about the monkey is because it's still alive today and the reason that it's alive today is because it's been "evolving" for the same exact amount of time as human beings have.

In fact, every single species that is alive today has been evolving for the same exact amount of time as human beings have.

Chimps didn't go down the wrong evolutionary path to become chimps, just like humans didn't go down the wrong path and become humans.

For the museum to not only employ the term "lower" but to actually put it in quotation marks which is to consciously acknowledge the loaded, mythological function of the term, deeply offends me.

It's bad enough that lies about the "purpose" of evolution reproduce at will, but they shouldn't be promulgated along by people that know better.


v.
At this point, many will argue that I'm being too hard on museums. That museums exist for the laymen who don't really understand science, or that they exist for children to take field trips to. And I sort of understand museums are about entertainment. But they're not completely about entertainment just as much as they're not about education.

They're meant for both.

But a cultural museum is not like an art museum. When you take your kid to an art museum there is really very little that can go wrong. 

The only lie you can harmfully transmit is to misdefine "art." One can, incorrectly and with considerable damage to a child's intellectual development, teach that modern art--Jackson Pollack's "Autumn Rhythm" for instance--is not art.

Of course it's art. What else is it?

One cannot say that modern art isn't art because "my little kid can do better." Because whatever your little kid produces is also actually art. You can say that modern art is bad art, just like I can say that your little kid has no talent and should stay in school, but you can't say that modern art isn't art. One is certainly entitled to their opinion about the quality of art, but the existence of art is not a debatable subject.

Art is not only subjective to personal taste, but actually must be subjective to personal taste in order to be art. On the other hand, science is not open to individual interpretation

There's no taste component to science. You can't ask a kid to look at a research survey and ask them whether they like it or not. (Or you can, but what's the point?)

Science is about reaching consensus. The stronger the consensus the stronger the science, and the stronger the science the stronger the consensus. Science is about the absence of taste.

A parent, a teacher, an irresponsible curator, can do a great deal of damage to a child's science education because the teaching of science is considerably more difficult than the teaching of art.

Why would a child "like" one version of evolution more than the other?

If museums exist in some part to educate, then what is the point of teaching children lies?

Doesn't it take just as much effort to explain the bogus version of evolution instead of the real one?

Why is it easier to understand one abstract concept—evolution is a long process intended to create an intelligent species—than another abstract concept—there is no purpose of evolution, it's just a process that continually reward species for reproducing with no foresight in mind at all.
 
As a curator of the AMNH, Neil de Grasse Tyson, would argue, it is wrong, both scientifically and morally, to teach one's children bad science, the same way it may be considered negligent to teach them bad math.

And yet, here we are in an exhibit seemingly built by human beings for the express purpose to make us feel good about ourselves.

Look kids, we won!

See all those other "lower" species? What a bunch of suckers. Thank God we're us!

This isn't science, it's religion, and it confirms the advice of my old mentor. These places, and I say this as a man who loves museums, for the sake of our better interest, deserve sometimes to meet the dynamite.

Or at least, in the case of the newly opened wing of the AMNH, a thorough and considerable copy-edit.