Lies, damned lies, and Darwin tours

[imomus]

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As lawyers, bankers and lots of other professionals know, lying for a living is nice work if you can get it. Here's a clip of my unreliable tour yesterday of the Schirn Kunsthalle's Darwin exhibition -- part of the Playing the City programme.

Comments

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I took a quick look round the show on Saturday and made a page of notes, with basic scenarios and stopping points worked out. In the heat of the moment, of course, I embroidered some new details in, but also forgot some of the best lines -- I was going to do a whole thing about how Darwin had reversed "ontogeny repeats phylogeny", discovering that when an individual discovers a new hobby, he condemns all future generations to have that hobby -- he changes, in other words, his species irrevocably. But I had enough on my hands negotiating the rooms in such a way that the other tours (the "reliable" ones) didn't clash with mine. It became, in fact, "survival of the fittest tour". I had a natural advantage in the form of the bull horn.

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

Okay. Wasn't sure if I recalled you having notes at the Whitney, so I thought I'd ask.

Yeas, if one's life experiences can influence the physiology of one's brain, then it follows suit that new cultural idioms will have an effect in some small way. One's genome contains in it the history of the people from which one derives: if one's ancestors lived primarily in cities or on farms, then one's physiology will differ from those whose ancestors were primarily hunter gatherers up until recently (resistance to cholera or smallpox, lactose intolerance, ability to heal quickly, body frame, propensity to gain weight, etc.). It may offer a slippery slope into eugenics, but the medical evidence backs it up.