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I think Nina Simon is exactly right (ISEN-ASTC-L #2007-83) in that story
telling is a powerful way to communicate, especially for complex issues,
which is too often neglected in informal science learning.  I just heard
Martin Weiss describe how the NY Hall of Science project on precursor
concepts for understanding scientific theories, including evolution, is
turning to story telling as a strategy.

We should have a list of narrative versions of evolution and other key
theories in various media, for research, evaluation, emulation, and
inspiration.  Perhaps somebody already has such a list, but I'll start off
with some of my favorite narratives about evolution:

*  "Evolution," a 1971 animated film from the National Film Board of Canada.
Nominated for an Academy Award, and with no spoken words, this is
astonishing, delightful, and shocking, all in 10 minutes and 21 seconds of
inspired story-telling.

*  "Victory," a 1915 novel by Joseph Conrad, is among many other things a
response to Darwin's evolution.  Watch for characters representing various
stages in the evolution of homo sapiens.  There is a huge list of literature
and critical essays, on novelists' and artists' responses to evolution.  I
happened to take an eye-opening course from the late Michael Gregory, a
Conrad scholar, who introduced me to this means of storytelling about
evolution.

*  "Surface Tension," a short story by James Blish, is just one of his many
short and long fictions about evolution and genetic engineering, collected
in a 1957 volume "The Seedling Stars."  Science fiction throughout the 20th
century was filled with expositions, explorations, and extrapolations of
Darwinian evolution, often written by scientists.  Blish is delightfully
readable by all ages; for a rather less accessible but breathtakingly
sweeping treatment, see "First and Last Men" by Olaf Stapleton (1930).

*  "Man and Superman," a play by George Bernard Shaw, is about Don Juan,
philosophy, manners, and evolution.  The third act, "Don Juan in Hell," is
often performed on its own, and is a dazzling exposition of how Darwinian
ideas could be applied or misapplied to shorter term cultural development.
I had a tape at one time of a version with George C. Scott playing the Devil
in such a charming manner that I was on his side instantly (and I expect
Shaw was too, at least emotionally).

*  "The Immense Journey" (1957) and "Darwin's Century" (1958) by Loren
Eisely are examples of good science exposition so movingly and beautifully
written that they read more like stories.  Here's my favorite sentence from
the latter title:  "Only James Hutton brooding over a little Scottish brook
that carried sediment down to the sea felt the weight of the solid continent
slide uneasily beneath his feet and cities and empires flow away as
insubstantially as a summer cloud."  This may sound more like poetry than
science explication.  It is in fact a concise summary at the end of a
chapter describing the key geological concept which gave Darwin the eons of
time he needed for biological evolution to be plausible.

Surely someone has collected an annotated list of evolution narratives like
these.  I hope a reader of the listserv will locate the best theses, books,
or teachers' guides to evolution narratives and let us all know.  Then our
job will be to figure out how to incorporate narratives in our own media,
such as exhibitions.  On the off-chance that no such lists exist, who has a
graduate student in need of a project?  Or perhaps a small NSF grant could
launch this as an on-line community wiki-endeavor?

Cheers,
Alan

****************************************************
Alan J. Friedman, Ph.D.
Consultant
Museum Development and Science Communication
29 West 10th Street
New York, New York 10011 USA
T  +1 917 882-6671
F  +1 212 673-2279
E  [log in to unmask] 

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