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The exhibit on Charles Darwin at the American Museum of Natural History in NYC is not to be missed. I am a biologist by trade; you could say biology is my business. Yet I learned a great deal from this "popular" exhibition, and three hours passed before I could tear myself away. There is something in it for everyone, from high school kids to working scientists.

Toward the end, I came upon a video presentation, which took on the controversy of intelligent design, aka creationism, versus evolution. And there I found that both the Museum and a number of my fellow scientists had taken a pass on the controversy. One prominent biologist featured in the video reassured us that he is a man of faith and a man of science. He warned the creationists of the danger - to themselves - of filling in gaps in our understanding of the natural world with God. This, he lamented, posed a threat to the believer. For, if science later filled in those gaps with provable, natural explanations, one's faith could be put in jeopardy. I found this a peculiar argument. After all, should we not amend our views based on new facts? Or was this scientist saying: don't let the facts get in your way when it comes to God? In fact the intellectual history of the last five hundred years has been a chronicle of plucking God out of such gaps and inserting scientific explanations. Darwin's idea of natural selection itself was presaged by the rapidly developing science of geology, which had found that the earth was far older than the 6000 years calculated from the Bible. The earth's great age provided Darwin with the vast stretches of time required for natural selection to do its work.

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