Visiting the Perot Museum of Nature and Science

I’ve been checking out some Darwin-worshipping museums. The latest issue of WORLD Magazine contains a look at the Houston Museum of Natural Science, and our Aug. 22 issue examined the National Museum of Natural History (aka the Smithsonian) in Washington, D.C., and the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Now some WORLD members are also getting in on the fun and photographing some exhibits, as George Damoff recently did in Dallas.

The Perot Museum of Nature and Science offered no Texas-sized surprises. We wouldn’t expect a museum named after its big-ego donor to have a lot of humility concerning what scientists know and what they don’t know. The sign shown here goes on to note that a tiny worm is “a lot like us, with a nervous system, muscles, digestive tract, reproductive system and made of the same DNA sequences we have.”

That statement is factual, but next comes religion: “This tells us that, millions of years ago, C. elegans and humans shared a common ancestor.” It tells us nothing of the sort. We and our worm pals could share a common Designer. Other museum signs assuming that “Life on Earth continues its evolution” also assume too much. Perot invites kids and adults to “Find out what makes us part of this amazing family of life,” but they’re much more likely to find out in church on Sunday than in the museum on Monday.

I read reviews of the Perot Museum on its website. Many were excited, some were bored, but Joanne Nemmers offered this comment eight months ago:

“Beautiful museum but left me longing for the days when evolution was still presented as a theory and not a proven fact (which it is not and will never be). Nearly every exhibit was presented in this way to the exclusion of actual scientific and natural facts. My son said the key to enjoying the museum was to skip reading any of the plaques and signs.”

It’s good advice in general to avoid propaganda, but if you visit your city’s natural history museum please read the plaques and send me (molasky@wng.org) photos of those that either strongly affirm evolution or question it.