Lucy and the Pacific Science Center
Lucy is the name given to one of the world’s most famous fossils, a 40% complete skeleton of a 3.2 million year old Australopithecus afarensis. The current Pacific Science Center exhibit of Lucy will end on March 8, and we have the remarkable opportunity to see this skeleton while it is in town. The Associated Press reports that Lucy may not be out of Africa for some time, so this may be the only time we get a chance to see Lucy.
On most days, the PSC is open from 10 – 5, and admission costs $20.75, which includes regular exhibits as well as the Lucy exhibit. However, on Thursdays, after other exhibits close, the Lucy exhibit will remain open until 9 PM, and admission to the single exhibit costs only $12.00. If you are considering whether the exhibit is worth $12.00, there are more details at the PSC website.
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This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 28th, 2009 at 4:26 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
January 28th, 2009 at 10:48 pm
Since this is a site devoted to secularism, it is perhaps worth pointing out that the directors of Pacific Science Center recently colluded with an unethical, religiously motivated scheme aimed at concealing a scholarly scandal from the public.
The precise goal of this scheme, involving Dead Sea Scrolls scholarship, was to shore up the reputations of the disgraced group of conservative Christian monopolists who controlled access to the scrolls for many years.
Further, this group, with the assistance of Pacific Science Center, sought to convince the public of the truth of a highly disputed, religiously oriented theory, which has been rejected by reputable, secular-minded researchers all over the world. Pacific Science Center did not even inform the public of scholarly opposition to the theory in question.
Under such circumstances, what form of scientific integrity can Pacific “Science” Center claim to have? Why should anyone support such an institution, or believe anything they see in exhibitions put on under its auspices?
Here is a set of items which anyone can consult to see exactly what happened at Pacific Science Center — and then, incidentally, in San Diego:
http://oi.uchicago.edu/research/is/deadseascrolls.html
http://www.nowpublic.com/culture/did-christian-agenda-lead-biased-dead-sea-scrolls-exhibit-san-diego
http://robertdworkin.wordpress.com/2008/07/12/the-ethics-of-exhibition-romancing-the-scrolls/
http://www.forward.com/articles/take-claims-about-dead-sea-scrolls-with-a-grain-of/
http://museum-ethics.blogspot.com/2007/06/chronology-of-dead-sea-scrolls.html
And see now the National Post article on this controversy:
http://www.nationalpost.com/arts/story.html?id=954321
February 14th, 2009 at 12:08 am
From the HarperCollins Bible Dictionary entry on the Dead Sea Scrolls:
“So the identification of the Qumran sect with the Essenes remains still the best hypothetical explanation. It is important to realize, however, that not all of the Qumran texts are sectarian, i.e., composed by members of the sect and reflecting tenets and practices of the community of Jews who lived at Khirbet Qumran. Many belong to a common Jewish literary heritage often called ‘intertestamental’ literature and were read and used by members of the Qumran community. Attempts have been made at times to deny that an Essene community ever lived at Khirbet Qumran, to maintain that the site was rather a Herodian and later a Roman fort, and to explain that the texts discovered in the caves were really brought from Jerusalem libraries prior to the destruction of the city (A.D. 70) and deposited there for safekeeping, as the Copper Plaque (3Q15) might attest. But such attempts misinterpret the archeological data, the character of the Qumran cemetery, and the unmistakable ‘Qumran system’ of copying texts that characterizes many of the sectarian documents. The Jerusalem origin of the Qumran texts fails to explain the relation of the caves to the common center and the pronounced sectarian character of many of the scrolls. If some scrolls did come from Jerusalem, then they were brought there by sectarian confreres who may have dwelled in Jerusalem near the Gate of the Essenes, but that is no reason to deny the existence of an Essene community at Qumran.”
The association of the Qumran texts with the Essene sect may be only a hypothesis, but it is the closest thing to a consensus among biblical scholars, many of whom are not the conservative Christians that the above writer associates with the Essene hypothesis (supposedly there’s a common joke that you have to be an atheist to get into Harvard Divinity School). If the scholarly community is truly divided over this issue, then the museum ought to present both sides, but I don’t think the dissenting hypothesis the above writer mentions has yet had much influence among Dead Sea Scroll experts.