After Darwin

It took Charles Darwin 30 years to write 'The Expressions of the Emotions in Man and Animals' and it seems to have taken the Natural History Museum an age to open this show of contemporary responses, in a year already stuffed to the gills with the biologist's bicentennial celebrations. Also, because the NHM was quicker off the mark installing its 'Darwin Canopy' ñ an unfurling cross-section of 200-year-old tree branches by Tania Kovats in the atrium ñ this show feels even more of an after thought.

Darwin's 1872 study linking human and mammalian facials has always been overshadowed by his 'Origin of Species', despite swelling the trend for all things physiognomical and phrenological. This comeback is similarly low-key, with the emotions pouring out of such tiny videoed heads in Tina Gonsalves's 'Chameleon Project' as to make them barely visible.

Empathy is also hard to come by in Mark Haddon's short stories accompanying Darwin's definitions of anxiety, joy and sulkiness, simply because each tale involves an effort of reading, rather than the immediately hilarious looks of crying babies, wincing men and purring cats from the original book. Credit is due for commissioning new pieces (Bill Viola's tedious video from 1986 notwithstanding), but only Diana Thater's touching 'gorillagorillagorilla' really counts as serious Darwinian enquiry.

The slapstick ending is a mirror by Jeremy Deller entreating visitors to make silly chimp faces like the monkey scream and the pant-hoot, really little more than an evolutionary step down from his earlier gurning championships in which men underlined their cromagnoid cranial capabilities.