Francis Collins, a geneticist, was appointed by President Obama to be the Director of the National Institutes of Health. He cleared his Senate confirmation hearings without a problem, but then his fellow scientists began to question the President's choice. The details are in Peter J. Boyer's article titled, "The Covenant," published in The New Yorker on Sept. 6, 2010. The basic idea is that Collins is a Christian, which is unusual among scientists. Collins tries to combine the idea that a divine power created humans and evolution. As the sentence beneath the graphic states, Obama wants "harmony between science and religion" so Collins' ideals matched the President's.
I think this graphic is strong because it visually represents the effort it will take to combine these two ideas. It will be literally an uphill battle to make these two different schools of thought see "eye-to-eye," as the popular phrase says. The overwhelming blackness from the hill gives the reader a sense of doom, eluding to the idea that this is an almost impossible task.
A weakness of this graphic is that Collins is represented so small that it takes a minute to figure out that that is who is represented. Collins is not a totally recognizable public figure, but Boyer did describe what he looks like in the article so a bigger Collins would have worked. The only hint that lets the reader figure out it is Collins at the top of the hill is the white scientist's coat. At the same time, the small stature of Collins could be representing that Collins is a small part of this big debate, that is represented by the massive black hill.
This graphic does not give away more information the longer the reader examines it, so it's not very complex. The way to make it interactive would be for the reader to be able to click on each set of symbols (the Jesus walking the cross up the hill, Collins, and the evolving humans) to read quotes from each side of the debate.
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