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On Saturday, the Financial Times described the entries in an artistic competition sponsored by London's Natural History Museum to commemorate next year's celebration of the bicentenary of the birth of Charles Darwin and the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species with a new ceiling for one of its galleries.[1] -- "If evolution is a faith, London's Natural History Museum is its cathedral and Charles Darwin its patron saint," Neville Hawcock said. "And just as the great Christian churches could, in their pomp, summon Leonardo or Raphael to embellish them, so the NHM can call on today's art-world elite for its decorative needs. Among the 10 artists it has approached . . . are Turner Prize-winners Rachel Whiteread and Mark Wallinger, and the venerable sculptor Richard Wentworth. Their proposals are on show in a small but provocative exhibition that should give heart to anyone who thinks that art and science ought to have more to do with each other. -- The theological comparison may be unfair, of course — high-priest Richard Dawkins will fume that evolution, being empirically testable, is at least not a blind faith — but it's hard to avoid. After all, the NHM itself, completed in 1881 by Alfred Waterhouse, deliberately mimics the medieval Romanesque style, though its ornament comprises plants and animals, not saints and angels. More immediately, in several of the artists' proposals there are ideas and images that evoke religion." ...

If evolution is a faith, London's Natural History Museum is its cathedral and Charles Darwin its patron saint. And just as the great Christian churches could, in their pomp, summon Leonardo or Raphael to embellish them, so the NHM can call on today's art-world elite for its decorative needs. Among the 10 artists it has approached to create a new ceiling for one of its galleries are Turner Prize-winners Rachel Whiteread and Mark Wallinger, and the venerable sculptor Richard Wentworth. Their proposals are on show in a small but provocative exhibition that should give heart to anyone who thinks that art and science ought to have more to do with each other.

The theological comparison may be unfair, of course -- high-priest Richard Dawkins will fume that evolution, being empirically testable, is at least not a blind faith -- but it's hard to avoid. After all, the NHM itself, completed in 1881 by Alfred Waterhouse, deliberately mimics the medieval Romanesque style, though its ornament comprises plants and animals, not saints and angels. More immediately, in several of the artists' proposals there are ideas and images that evoke religion.

Dorothy Cross suggests gilding the ceiling and installing a floor-to-ceiling column of glass; within this would be engraved a skull, and engraved within that a skeletal foetus. This, she says in her accompanying statement, is because "to celebrate Darwin requires an iconic image," here one representing "a collusion between birth and death, inheritance and thought, and particularly nature and art." Well, it may or may not. But such opposition-embracing images -- Alpha and Omega, "in the midst of life we are in death" -- have a distinct whiff of the divine.

Consider, too, Christine Borland's elaborate, gruesome, slightly icky proposal to create a tree with branches terminating in super-realistic human limbs (of the sort surgeons practice on); an image of it will be transferred on to glass and projected on to the ceiling. The reference is secular: to the tree of evolution, with common ancestors branching into many species, sketched by Darwin in a notebook as early as 1837, and to Darwin's study of animal forelimbs to back up his hypothesis. But in the participative first stage of Borland's scheme, visitors will be asked to insert a coin into one of numerous cuts in the limbs, creating, she says "a moment for reflection and personal interaction with Darwin's ideas." The lighting of prayer candles comes to mind.

Perhaps such responses are inevitable given the nature of the brief, which was to produce a work responding to Darwin's ideas. Darwin's Canopy, as the commission is called, is part of the build-up to the bicentenary of Darwin's birth, which will be comprehensively celebrated next year, along with the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species; the plan is to unveil the finished ceiling -- which will be in a small gallery overlooking the grand entrance hall; this is no far-flung corner -- on February 12, Darwin's birthday. His ideas are crucial to the modern understanding of the natural world and of man's place in it, just as the concepts of faith were central to the pre-modern understanding. Any adequate artistic response will tend to have a comparable universalism and resonance, with a hard-to-resist side-order of reverence.

Even so, many of the proposals avoid religious overtones. Some also appear to have no Darwinian overtones either. Wentworth's, for example, consists of a plantation of variously sized circular mirrors mounted on arms, like some expressionist nightmare of dentistry. The piece is dedicated, he explains, "to Darwin's peripheral vision, his capacity for negotiating abstractions and his ability to make his own luck." It sounds like the blurb to Darwin, CEO: surely these aren't distinctively Darwinian traits?

Nor does Wallinger seem to have answered the question. He wants to convert the entire Oxford Book of English Verse 1250-1900 into one giant, punctuationless slab of text abitlikethis. Implicit in this is perhaps the idea of Darwin as the great punctuator, who parsed the flux of nature into intelligibility -- and nature is, Wallinger tells us, at the heart of English poetry. He also notes that the OBEV was part of many soldiers' kit during the First World War, when it was jokingly known as the Atheist's Bible; but that's a pretty thin thread on which to hang an allusion to Darwin as atheism's poster-boy.

The other artists are, to varying degrees, more obviously faithful to the big man. Whiteread wants to cover the ceiling with reliefs of animal tracks, all in white plaster; Mark Fairnington proposes 12 roundels of realistically painted animal eyes. Both are congruent with the museum's existing flora-and-fauna décor and will appeal to the kids who flock to the place, but may -- Whiteread's in particular -- look too meagre in situ, given that the gallery has two long facing ranks of stained-glass windows. Mark Wood's design, on the other hand, would give the stained glass a run for its money: it is a gaudy matrix of assorted nature-motif ceramic tiles, to which visitors can, like Darwin, apply their own taxonomies.

Somewhere between the two are Alison Turnbull's coolly understated panels of color in anodized aluminium -- the outer ones run from black to white, evoking the fast-evolving markings of the peppered moth in the 19th century, as industrial grime blackened its habitat -- and Tania Kovats' Tree, a ceiling-spanning cross-section through, yes, a tree; like Borland's piece, its reference is Darwin's sketch of evolution but, being more traditionally rendered, in a veneer-like medium, is less likely to perturb the squeamish.

The most extravagant proposal is the most scrupulously Darwinian. Design practice UnitedVisualArtists wants to run a computer simulation of plant species competing on a space equivalent in area and lightfall to the ceiling; after a few thousand generations, a digital snapshot will be taken, reproduced in 3D and given an elegant coppery finish. Presumably, to ensure that a suitably interesting riot of forms results, the designers will have to tweak the program. That would be a godsend (if that's the word) to those who believe in intelligent design, as well as a nightmare for the hapless cleaners who have to dust the finished product.

The panel of judges will announce who gets the commission on Monday. Whether or not you agree with the artists' approaches, all have engaged intelligently and interestingly with the NHM's brief (there's an illuminating little display about Darwin's life and work at the show's center by way of reference). Darwinism has yet to find its Michelangelo, but it's been a fruitful search.