A Museum of Ideas: Evolution Education at the Yale Peabody Museum During the 1920s

Abstract

In 1925, just a few months after the infamous Scopes Trial, the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History in New Haven, Connecticut, opened its new building. Its creators, most notably director Richard Swann Lull, used the world-renowned fossil collections amassed by Othniel C. Marsh to lay out exhibits that explicitly illustrated the organic evolution of life. At the time, scientists had many different ideas on the mechanisms of evolution: many were very sceptical about Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Lull and his colleagues, particularly Henry Fairfield Osborn of the American Museum of Natural History, used museum exhibits to illustrate their particular ideas about evolution to the public. Whether museum visitors absorbed these ideas is not established. However, the opening of the Peabody Museum received almost universal acclaim, indicating that in many states evolution was widely accepted and not necessarily seen as being at odds with religious beliefs.

Keywords:

• Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History
• museum evolution exhibits
• evolution by natural selection
• natural history museums in the early twentieth century
• Richard Swann Lull
• Henry Fairfield Osborn

Acknowledgements

Both authors would like to thank Barbara Narendra, archivist extraordinaire at the Yale Peabody Museum. This paper is based on a senior essay by Alison Logan, who would also like to thank Dan Brinkman, Walter Joyce, and Ole Molvig for their help with her paper, and Carol Bam and Foster Bam for their support.