It's Not Just About the Sins of the Fathers

An obsession with past wrongdoing is distracting museums from their own best work

by Richard Conniff

The Yale Stegosaurus reanimated (Photo: Richard Conniff)

When scholars write these days about early explorers of the natural world, it’s mainly to ferret out their many ethical failings. They want to “problematize” their lives and “decolonize” their history. And they have plenty of material to work with.

For instance: The Yale paleontologist O.C. Marsh robbed Indian graves. He also sometimes neglected to pay his field workers and assistants but almost always took credit for their work. Pioneering bird artist John James Audubon owned slaves early in his career and sold them when he needed cash. Carolus Linnaeus, who devised the system of scientific naming, categorized blacks as a separate species. And Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, co-founders of the theory of evolution by natural selection, perpetuated the racial and gender stereotypes of their time.

Guilty as charged, though this is hardly breaking news. Critics pilloried Marsh in the 1870s for desecrating Indian graves, and abolitionists went after Audubon. The idea that some scientists (accountants, postal workers, politicians, etc) were racists or sexists is dismaying, in the 19th century or the 21st. But it’s hardly surprising. Many explorers also served at the behest of various European empires and their work helped exploit the natural wealth of the distant nations being colonized.

So fair enough, decolonize away! It’s useful work. It’s also how you get published in scholarly journals and it’s the quickest path to advancement in the current academic climate. (In that sense, it’s not so different from newspaper reporters—back when we had newspapers—digging up the latest scandal as the best way to crack the front page.)

The trouble is that work done by these same ethically dubious explorers was and remains critical to our understanding of the natural world. When you send the message that these people were essentially evil, you risk driving people away from nature and science at the very moment we need them to come closer.

Here’s an example in my neighborhood. When the Yale Peabody Museum (formerly the Peabody Museum of Natural History) reopened earlier this year, it gave me plenty to think about. (Full disclosure: In researching House of Lost Worlds, my history of the Peabody’s first 100 years, I worked closely with staff and consider myself a friend of the museum. Did I give proper treatment to the sins of major figures in that history? Well, you can read the book and decide for yourself.)

For its reopening, the museum (and Research Casting International, which handled the restorations) did a magnificent job rethinking and reimagining the specimens on display. The Stegosaurus, first described by O.C. Marsh in 1877, used to seem as listless and even brainless as it was thought to be at that time. The reconfigured Stegosaurus now feels almost alive. It seems to watch as you pass by. The Brontosaurus, introduced to the world by O.C. Marsh in 1879, used to be a plodding thing with its long tail dragging in the mud. Now that tail is like a whip raised high overhead.

Archelon, a giant sea turtle, hotly pursued by a mosasaur (Photo: Richard Conniff)

I could go on, and you might get the impression that O.C. Marsh was a major figure in paleontology. In truth, his discoveries in the American West launched the 19th-century dinosaur revolution. His work describing two spectacular fossil birds—Hesperornis and Ichthyornis—also provided “the best support to the theory of Evolution, which has appeared within the last twenty years.” So Darwin himself wrote in 1880.

One of the museum’s new labels grudgingly admits as much in a single sentence: “Yale’s O.C. Marsh shaped the field of paleontology and our understanding of Earth’s prehistory.” But the rest of that five-sentence label gives us no hint of how he did that, because it devotes the next four sentences to problematizing Marsh’s “inexcusable” life. A young visitor who takes the time to read the label is likely to come away with the impression that paleontologists—and perhaps naturalists more generally—are bad people.

In truth, almost all the museum’s new labels are like that, intently focused on redressing past wrongs. These labels are rumored to have been written by students, a group well known (not least from my own experience as a student) for a propensity to self-righteousness and virtue signaling.

They ignore the practical purpose of labels on museum displays: To put the specimens in their historical context and tantalize the reader into wanting to learn more. There’s certainly no attempt to inspire young minds to become explorers themselves. When another friend of the Peabody (my college classmate Edward Rothstein) reviewed the revamped museum for the Wall Street Journal, the headline was blunt: “Smearing Science.”

It’s not just the Peabody, of course. Many natural history museums now feel obliged to amplify the message of past wrongdoing. But it’s possible to acknowledge that past, while at the same time explaining and even celebrating the actual science these museums have produced along the way.

The researchers going out to distant places to understand life on Planet Earth were doing work as exciting and hazardous as anything done by modern astronauts intent on colonizing other planets. In a column for the New York Times about their work, I wrote:

In truth, the history of biological discovery is a chronicle of such hazards faced not just willingly, but with a kind of joy.  In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, young naturalists routinely shipped out for destinations that must have seemed almost as remote as the moon is to us now, often traveling not for days, but for months or years.  They went of course without GPS devices, or anti-malarial drugs, or any of the other safety measures we now consider routine.

Reading the journals of these explorers for another book, The Species Seekers, I saw how deeply … problematized their lives were in the field, and not just a century later from the distant perspective of an office on some campus. I began to note how many of those early explorers died in their work. (They continue to die. I keep a list.)

O.k., the risk of dying is probably not the best message for inspiring young people to become explorers themselves. But I also tried to convey the rewards of that work:

No doubt the species seekers undertook such risks partly for the adventure.  (“Hunted by a tiger when moth-catching,” one wrote. “Hunt tigers myself.”)   They also clearly loved the natural world.  “I trembled with excitement as I saw it coming majestically toward me,” Alfred Russel Wallace wrote, of a spectacular butterfly in the East Indies, “& could hardly believe I had really obtained it till I had taken it out of my net and …

The birdwing butterfly Ornithoptera priamus arruana

gazed upon its gorgeous wings of velvet black & brilliant green, its golden body & crimson breast … I have certainly never seen a more gorgeous insect.”  Naturalists were also caught up body and soul in the great intellectual enterprise of collecting, classifying, and coming to terms with the diversity of life on Earth.

And I suggested why it was worth the risks:

It would be difficult to overstate how profoundly they changed the world along the way.  Many of us are alive today, for instance, because naturalists identified obscure species that later turned out to cause malaria, yellow fever, typhus, and other epidemic diseases; other species provided treatments and cures.   And a month after capturing that butterfly, Wallace pulled together the ideas that had been piling up during his years of field work and, trembling with malarial fever, wrote Darwin the proposal that would become their joint theory of evolution by natural selection.

These are the stories—and better ones—that natural history museums themselves could be telling. They should tell better stories, not least for their own survival. Short-sighted politicians and university presidents now commonly have the notion that natural collections are a quaint 19th century irrelevance marred by a history of ethical failings. They cut funding and shut down museums when they think they can get away with it. Or they let them linger on without even enough money for basic safety precautions, with the result that two great national collections, in Brazil and India, have gone up flames over the past decade.

They should tell inspiring stories not least because young people, the most important audience for natural history museums, have become increasingly disconnected from the natural world. Our digital culture means they are far more familiar with advertising jingles and corporate logos than they are with the plants and animals outside their own homes. As a result, they are less likely, as adults, to care about those plants and animals, even as climate change and the sixth extinction advance calamitously before their inattentive eyes.

Instead of dwelling on past sins, this is the future natural history museums need to be thinking about it.

Richard Conniff’s books include The Species Seekers: Heroes, Fools and the Mad Pursuit of Life on Earth (W.W. Norton), Spineless Wonders: Strange Tales of the Invertebrate World (Henry Holt), and House of Lost Worlds: Dinosaurs, Dynasties, and the Story of Life on Earth (Yale). He is a former contributing opinion writer for The New York Times, and a National Magazine Award-winning feature writer for Smithsonian, National Geographic, The Atlantic, and other publications.