MICHELANGELO depicted his vision of God creating earth on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Now evolutionary scientists are to have their riposte with a plan by the Natural History Museum to decorate its ceiling with art inspired by the theories of Charles Darwin.

The museum has drawn up a shortlist of 10 artists whose sculptures or paintings will adorn the ceiling of a gallery on the first floor of its building in west London. The list includes the Turner prize-winning sculptors Mark Wallinger and Rachel Whiteread.

The winner will be chosen by this summer and the work will be unveiled next February to coincide with the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth. Next year will also mark 150 years since publication of The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, Darwin’s revolutionary work.

The artists spent last Thursday and Friday being briefed on Darwin. “It was a very intensive crash course,” said Whiteread, best known for House, her 1993 concrete sculpture cast from a home in the East End of London.

The artists admitted they had previously been largely ignorant of Darwin, beyond knowing that he was the naturalist who drew up the theory that life evolved through natural selection from a few common ancestors.

“Artists are tribal in the sense that we mix with each other and don’t know much about science,” said Richard Wentworth, another sculptor on the shortlist. “I’d like to cheat a bit and pierce the ceiling with a work which is on the lines of reflection and observation. This is what Darwin was all about - a man who observed and thought deeply. I think my work will involve mirrors because that is the other meaning of reflection.”

The ceiling, which is an unusual shape with several awkward angles and is more than 50ft long, will present a challenge. “The room is like a 1920s village hall with its panelled ceiling,” said Wallinger, who won the Turner Prize last year for his recreation of the demonstration by Brian Haw, the peace protester, outside parliament.

Bob Bloomfield, the project director, hoped it would transform a museum that was built in the 1870s: “We want to encourage contemporary artists because as thinkers they are ahead of others like Darwin was.”

Although some of the artists seemed more confused than enlightened about what to do after their crash course in Darwinism, scientists offered some inspiration. “How about the chosen artist doing something like one of Damien Hirst’s pickled cows or sheep, and then offering it up as a scientific experiment,” said Steve Jones, professor of genetics and head of the biology department at University College London.

“My other idea is that something should commemorate Darwin and Down House in Kent where he spent virtually all his life after he came back from his trip around the world when only 27. Too many people think it was simply down to his visit to the Galapagos, where in fact he only spent a few days on land.”

Another scientist, Dr Jane Camerini of the University of Wisconsin and author of books on evolution, has a more novel idea. “It’s Alfred Russel Wallace who should be commemorated,” she said. “It was Wallace, another naturalist who came up with the same or very similar theory to Darwin at the same time. Yet he is virtually unrecognised.”

But Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist and professor of the public understanding of science at Oxford University, said he would prefer a poem or a piece of music. “I’ll be frank, I know nothing of art,” he said.

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of the Decade
• 70 facts you didn't know about Marvel
• The 50 Biggest Movies Of 2010