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FLY KARAOKE: Singers can compete with Drosophila flies to create the most appealing love songs. View Slide Show
© ANGIE FOX/UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA STATE MUSEUM

View Slide Show

Madonna and Bon Jovi are no match for Hawaiian flies when it comes to karaoke hits at the University of Nebraska State Museum in Lincoln. In a popular exhibit activity, visitors attempt to mimic the unique courtship calls of different species of Hawaiian Drosophila, a group of 800 different flies that may have evolved from a single species.

Fly karaoke is part of "Explore Evolution," a permanent exhibit currently at Nebraska and five other museums in the Midwest and Southwest (the Science Museum of Minnesota, the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History, the Exhibit Museum of Natural History at the University of Michigan and the University of Kansas Natural History Museum & Biodiversity Research Center, plus an October opening at the Texas Memorial Museum) that explores evolutionary concepts in new ways. Such an activity is a far cry from the traditional way science museums have presented evolution, which usually included charts called phylogenies depicting ancestral relationships or a static set of fossils arranged chronologically. "Explore Evolution'' has those, too—and then some, because museum curators came to realize that they needed better ways to counter growing attacks on their integrity.

The theory of evolution has always been denounced by creationists, who contend that the biblical story of "Genesis" is an accurate account of Earth's geologic and paleontological history and that The Origin of Species is blasphemous. The intelligent design (ID) movement that sprang from creationism in the 1990s gives an even more vague but equally unscientific explanation for natural history, claiming that nature is so complex that only an intelligent being or force could have been responsible for creating it. They, like creationists, argue that humans were never apelike and that children should learn about alternatives to evolution like ID in public school science classes. (No matter that their claims have no scientific basis or that the U.S. Constitution mandates a separation of church and state.)

Under pressure from these kinds of groups, the Kansas State Board of Education in 2005 approved a curriculum that allowed the public schools to include completely unfounded challenges to the theory of evolution.

In an effort to make their case to the public, creationists raised $26 million in private donations to build the 50,000-square-foot Creation Museum in Petersburg, Ky., which opened in late May. The institution presents the biblical history of the universe. Visitors learn that biblically, dinosaurs are best explained as creatures that roamed Earth with humans. In its first month of existence, the museum drew over 49,000 visitors, according to its Web site.

"Explore Evolution," funded by a $2.8 million grant from the National Science Foundation, is one of many recent efforts by science museums to counter such resistance to evolution. Curators like Judy Diamond, a professor and curator at the University of Nebraska State Museum, decided the traditional methods of presenting scientific evidence were not working to convince the public of evolution¿s validity, and came up with a new plan to lure visitors: interactive activities about evolution and lessons on how scientists ply their trade.

"The idea was to teach evolution by meeting real scientists, getting to understand what they do in their work, and then being introduced to evolution through the process of understanding their research," says Diamond, who designed the "Explore Evolution'' exhibit.

Each of the exhibit's seven displays focuses on a specific organism, relates it to evolution, and introduces the scientists who researched them. A giant wall of nucleotides compares the DNA of humans with that of their closer relatives, chimpanzees. And, in a Where's Waldo–type game, visitors are challenged to find small figures representing famous evolutionary scientist Svante Pääbo, director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, to illustrate the 1 percent difference between human and chimp genomes.