When the Royal Ontario Museum couldn't attract even a single corporate sponsor for its current exhibit on the life and work of Charles Darwin, people started talking.
People talked some more when the United Church Observer magazine and the Humanist Association of Canada stepped in with funds.
The man's been dead for nearly 150 years, and his theories are taught in schools across Canada, but he still causes a stir.
"I was surprised, because science and faith shouldn't be in conflict with each other," said Kim Gottfried, the director of a Catholic chaplaincy centre that serves the Ryerson community. "That's certainly not our teaching. The Bible is not a science book."
And nor is evolution gospel, we might add.
Gottfried said that while those who take the Bible's creation story literally might be offended by the idea of evolution, important Christian figures such as St. Augustine have questioned the literal interpretation of the Bible since at least the 4th century A.D.
The two don't have to be mutually exclusive, she concluded.
"[Darwin's ideas] can bring us to greater questions about why we exist," she said.
However, visitors to the ROM's new exhibit might just find themselves understanding better why Darwin is still so controversial.
After all, in the course of one lifetime, the great naturalist single-handedly re-imagined and re-wrote the human story.
Indeed, the greatest coup of this remarkable exhibit is that it intertwines the story of one man with the story of manhood itself, revealing the incredible power and trauma of Darwin's simple obervations, a trauma that has lasted to the present day.
The exhibit, which runs until August 8, has been criticized for being too facile, and it is true that aspects of it are aimed at kids -- including the live tortoises, frogs and iguana, as well as some of the choice bits of narrative (we learn right away that Darwin was "an indifferent student," a fact that must delight the school kids who stream through the place).
While the American Museum of Natural History, which curated most of the exhibit, ignored some of the stormier aspects of the Darwin story -- his famous forbears were no strangers to incest or addiction -- and avoided engaging Darwin's theory in full complexity, the exhibit is nonetheless a resounding success.
The biographical curation featuring letters, sketches, photographs and manuscripts, not to mention a life-sized reproduction of Darwin's study and fascinating narrative accounts of the man's life, tells the most enchanting and inspiring story of one man's imagination.
We learn that Darwin spent much of his youth reading and bird-watching, and a certain portion of his adulthood taking a boat, the HMS Beagle, around the world.
We are lulled with the chirping of birds and the buzzing of insects as we read about Darwin's obersvations in the jungles of Brazil. We stand next to a huge, live green iguana while reading of Darwin's discovery of swimming lizards on the Galapagos Islands.
We are given a glimpse of Darwin's father, a famous physician, and of the early passing of his daughter, Annie, as part of the picture of his life.
The man who emerges from this exhibit has, above all, a hunger for understanding. Darwin's legacy is the power of human curiosity, which is to seek answers to the most obvious and yet unlikely questions, such as the exquisite "Do monkeys cry?", a question posed by Darwin himself.
Darwin's ideas might interfere with literal readings of creation stories, but as Gottfried reminds, those accepting Darwin's theories also have a tendency to carry their convictions too far the other way.
"Radical Darwinists, they would go beyond scientific claims and say, 'if evolution is true, then there can't be a God,'" she said.
Excepting the more extreme interpretations of Darwinism, perhaps what's so shocking and hard-to-stomach about this great thinker are the existential implications of natural selection: that as nothing substantial separates man form mole, our beliefs might be nothing more than miraculous feats of animal imagination.
