In 2009, the Natural History Museum will host a Darwin Exhibition to celebrate the bicentennial of Darwin’s birth. This exhibition was created back in 2005 and is already touring a number of museums in the USA before coming to Britain.

This Spring, the peer-reviewed journal Evolutionary Psychology published a paper criticising the exhibition, "Getting our history right: six errors about Darwin and his influence".

The author, Hiram Caton, is emeritus Professor of Politics & History at Griffith University and currently writing a book on evolution in the nineteenth century. He is an evolutionist, an associate of the US-based National Center for Science Education and an expert on ethics in the sciences. He was shocked by the errors being promoted to school children by the exhibition.

“I promptly identified the Exhibition as hagiography” writes Caton (p. 53). It replicates “misrepresentation” by Darwin’s followers Huxley and Romanes, made when they were in “hero worship mood” (p. 54). Indeed, “the exhibition promotes an extreme version of the triumphalist legend” (p. 59). It even displays “devotion to the legend at the expense of fact” (p. 66).

Caton finds the Exhibition strangely “silent” over connections between Darwinism and Social Darwinism. He accuses it of “drastic distortion of historical fact” when it claims that Social Darwinism was a misuse of Darwinism and Darwin was “passionately opposed to social injustice and oppression” (p. 63).

The Exhibition is even mistaken in its underlying views of how science works. “The implicit idea is that science moves ever forward in a continuous line of accumulating evidence” (p. 65). In fact, “contrary to the Exhibition, science is more a polyarchy that a unity; what counts as proved varies in time” (p. 65). The Exhibition gives “sanitized history meant to instill unquestioning acceptance” (p. 66).

Caton calls on his fellow-evolutionists to “correct misrepresentations directed to schools at a time when evolution is under challenge” (p. 66). Whether these corrections will be in place by the time the exhibition reaches London remains to be seen.