Last week, Roger Ebert finally got around to destroying reviewing Ben Stein’s anti-evolution film, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. Ebert’s rant is as cerebral as it is merciless, and it’s worth a read even if you haven’t seen the film. He makes some good points about how the film completely misunderstands the concepts of probability and selection, forming flashy but ultimately useless argument.
Ebert’s rage is thinly veiled. He’s obviously upset that clear logical fallacies can go unnoticed by so many people. Sure, misreading Darwin while attempting to refute him is a lame move when engaging in scientific debate, but the practice is quite common when it comes to filmmaking. When movies deal with evolution, there’s an unspoken understanding that they can completely distort the theory beyond recognition. It’s kind of like calling someone a pedophile during a Friar’s Club Roast, everyone knows it isn’t true, and it’s all in good fun.
When you look at it in this way, Expelled is just the latest in a long line of films that distort the theory of evolution to make a buck. Here are 5 more that are guilty of crimes against the origin of humanity:
Evolution
This 2001 sci-fi/horror/comedy, directed by Ivan Reitman (of Ghostbusters fame), makes one of the most common errors in depicting evolution on film: the process happens much too quickly. It’s the result of an understandable dilemma. Evolution is cool and scary because species can transform into other species and become more advanced, but it takes too long! In the film, a meteor strikes the Earth and deposits a pile of primordial goo. The goo starts evolving like crazy, so that it’s a serious threat to the world in like, a week. While it’s true that simple life forms, left to there own devices, can evolve into something more advanced, it takes soooooo much longer than that. I know it’s a comedy and everything, but still, the real process is mind-numbingly slow.
Planet of the Apes
At first glance, Planet of the Apes seems to jive with Darwin’s theory pretty well. Not so fast, there are several problems. In case you haven’t seen it, Chuck Heston and friends have spent 2,006 years frozen on a space mission when they crash-land on a planet inhabited by intelligent apes and savage humans. (Spoiler alert) The planet is Earth, humans lost their superiority due to some calamity, allowing other primates to evolve into an advanced intelligence. There are two big problems here. One, there is no reason why the humans who survived the apocalypse would devolve. Sure, their society was destroyed, but that wouldn’t cause natural selection to reverse. If anything, the tough conditions would speed human evolution by eliminating the weak. The second problem is speed issue again. Heston and his pals were only gone for about one hundred human/ape generations, not nearly enough time to account for the changes to either species.
The Descent
This killer British horror film features an all-female cast of cave explorers who are attacked by pale humanoids known as “crawlers.” Writer/director Neil Marshall described the crawlers as cavemen who stayed in the caves, adapting perfectly to that environment. Sounds pretty good, except that there were never any cavemen in the Appalachian Mountains, where the film takes place. Humans first sprang up in Africa, and spread out from there, fully capable of dwelling on the surface of the Earth. While the nomads who came to North America probably did duck in caves to avoid rain, there would be no logical reason to stay there, because all the good food was outside. Waiting for wayward spelunkers to eat just isn’t a viable survival tactic in the long term.
Jurassic Park
The problems with Spielberg’s classic CGI dinosaur romp have more to do with cloning than evolution, but because both rely heavily on a proper understanding of genetics, it still counts. First of all, harvesting dinosaur DNA from mosquitoes lodged in amber would be extremely difficult. The film (and book) accounts for this by stating that missing chunks of the genome are replaced by genes from frogs and reptiles and such. Even if this could work, the resulting animals would not be dinosaurs, they would be part dinosaur and part frog, which sounds cool, but the organism would probably just die right away. Even if they could create a viable dinosaur cell nucleus, they wouldn’t have a dinosaur host cell, or oocyte, to put it into, which you need to make a clone. If that weren’t enough, most of the dinosaurs in the film aren’t from the Jurassic period, but the Cretaceous period.
Creature from the Black Lagoon
In this classic monster movie, a team of scientists hunt for fossils in the Amazon in hopes of finding a complete skeleton to match a webbed humanoid hand discovered on a previous mission. The hand is said to be a link between land and sea animals, which is total bullshit. If a crafty amphibious humanoid were the link between land a sea animals, the evolution of life would have to be caught in some weird time loop, connecting and overlapping species across hundreds of millions of years (which would actually be pretty cool). If such a creature existed it wouldn’t be a link at all, but a completely separate strand of evolution tracing back to a distant common ancestor, something like a fish with a taste for land-dwelling insects. Despite the obvious differences these separate evolutionary paths would create between the Gill-Man and humans, the monster in the film is sexually attracted to female humans, which makes no sense. Also, he seems to have evolved as an individual, which is impossible. Where was the Gill-Man’s family?
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