Lucy In The Pac Sci Center With Ethiopians

This was posted by Pharyngula, and brought to my attention today by a friend:

Seattle! Get off your butts!

Lucy's skeleton is on tour, and is currently on display at the Pacific Science Center — a lovely and interesting place even when the most famous australopithecine in the world isn't holding court. Here's the surprising news: Pacific northwesterners are not flocking to the museum. The science center is losing big buckets of money on the exhibit, and other museums around the country are hesitating about booking it — it may close after its Seattle run, and I won't get to see it!

I can't believe this. You have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see a wonderful relic of our ancient history, and you're staying home?

You still have time. It closes on 8 March. Go!

I hope "business" picks up for Lucy.

I went to see Lucy about a month ago, the same day we saw The Day The Earth Stood Still. At the time, it didn't occur to me to write a review of a science museum exhibit, but talking about a major motion picture came naturally. I guess that comments on my relative lack of culture.

Here's the scoop on Lucy: It's really two exhibits in one. The first two-thirds is an exhibit on the culture and history of Ethiopia, which just happens to be the country where Lucy's remains were found. And that's the problem - it's advertised as Lucy, you go there wanting to see Lucy, and instead you spend several hours in Ethiopia first.

The Ethiopia exhibit is actually really cool. I learned tons about their history, cultures, religions, and art. There's some really cool stuff about the religious customs and church designs I plan to use the next time I run a serious D&D campaign. I even learned things about Bob Marley and Rastafarianism, which I didn't expect from an Ethiopian exhibit. (Shows what little I knew.) There's some awesome exhibit items on display, like musical instruments I'd never heard of, several-thousand-year-old pottery, hand-written bibles, ancient coins, exotic spices, and the royal sword of Ethiopia. It's a great exhibit covering a wide range of topics connected to Ethiopia from biblical times to the modern day. The gift shop was selling spices and cookbooks for Ethiopian cuisine, and we're still experimenting with new flavors.

But what we'd been expecting and waiting for was Lucy. She was at the very end of the exhibit, after you'd been standing and reading for hours and fatigue was setting in. There was an interesting display of skulls of our various proto-human ancestors, but it was spread out on a inclined ramp leading up to Lucy. I found I was reading less about those skulls than I would have had they been placed an hour and a half earlier into the exhibit, and less than I would have had they not been on a ramp to Lucy. Instead of feeling like a focal point, the skulls were just something to distract you while you waited in line to enter Lucy's room. (And wait in line we did - the museum was packed at the end of December, though I understand it's rather quiet now.)

Lucy's room was small, and fairly quick to go through. There was a lot to read, but not much to look at - you felt like you could have learned it all from a book or a few wikipedia articles. Having those thoughts at the end of your visit was not a good idea. I don't know whether the flaw here was exhibit layout or advertising. If Lucy had been at the front of the exhibit, I think I would have been more impressed by her, and still been happy to explore Ethiopia afterwords. People just there to see Lucy could breeze through the remainder of the exhibit, and those (like myself) just hungry to learn could take our time. Instead, I think some folks felt compelled to rush through trying to get to Lucy before fatigue set in, and then couldn't gain reentry to the stuff they'd sped past. If the advertising had made it a little more clear that she was just one small facet of the exhibit, I think I wouldn't have been so surprised or impatient with the way it played out.

My wife and I really enjoyed the exhibit, and it was well worth our $20 a piece, but my wife liked the last third far more than the first part. She compared it to being invited to go see Star Wars, and not finding out till after you arrived that it's a double feature with The Thin Red Line playing before the sci-fi classic. The Thin Red Line is a quality film, and there's a tangential connection (war, or Ethiopia, as the case may be) between them, but stylistically it's a vastly different experience. You weren't expecting it, and probably won't appreciate it fully due to having it sprung on you unexpectedly, and that's a shame.

The exhibit has an additional hurdle to jump, related to the advertising: religion. A huge amount of the exhibit is devoted to the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. Learning about their religious customs and church architecture could be really appealing to someone who's really interested in the roots and breadth of Christianity. However, a sizable portion of that potential audience is going to be turned off by the notion of going to see a show about Evolution - and since that's how it's been marketed, they'll never learn what they're missing. On the flip side, there's a subset of so-called "militant atheists" who'll be bored to tears at the early Christianity stuff, and then feel let down that the Paleontology section is only a third of the exhibit.

It totally sucks that flaws in marketing and layout are keeping such an informative exhibit from succeeding. I think they could have done it as two exhibits - a short Lucy exhibit for $15, and a long Ethiopia exhibit for $10. If they'd offered $5 off if you attend both, it would have made the same money on folks like me, but allowed for the local Discovery Institute crowd to learn about the first Christian nation without scaring them off via the E-word, and impatient paleontology fans to get just the Lucy face-time they desired. With a bit of suggestive selling "for only $5 more you can see our very impressive Ethiopia exhibit" I think the Pacific Science Center would have come out ahead. Visitors would have been able to stop at the café and sit down for a couple minutes between exhibits - so more money there, too. Win-win all around.

P.S.: There's some cool things in the gift shop, too. The Ethiopian spice packs will really add some zing to meals. I like spicy food, so Berberé is my favorite - the package accurately reads "Deliciously Hot, Like the Ethiopian Sun" - but Mekelesha Kemem and Manteria Kemem are both pretty good as well. The gift shop is also selling Evolution for Everyone by David Sloane Wilson - it's a good book that I ought to review here sometime.