Related articles and links |  1 of 3

Evolution
PBS
September 24-27 (check local listings)

The seven-part series Evolution is billed as educational. Its high-minded goals are to "heighten understanding of evolution," to "dispel common misunderstandings," to "illuminate" evolution's relevance, "improve its teaching," and "encourage a national dialogue." But it comes across as propaganda for Charles Darwin and his cause. Evolution (no "theory" here) is the proud galleon, sailing forth under the banner of Science. The lesser barques and rowboats that move about in the background are those of Religion. But they are rather quaint and old fashioned and reactionary and of course cannot impede the stately progress of Science. One of the small craft, captained by Ken Ham, fundamentalist, has a supporting crew in choir robes.

The first installment dramatizes scenes from Charles Darwin's life. We learn that the budding scientist, who once planned to be a parson, has discovered this "incredibly powerful idea." Indeed, it is "the single best idea anybody ever had," says Tufts professor Daniel Dennett, so powerful that it puts Darwin "ahead of Newton, ahead of Einstein." But it is "dangerous" as well, and Darwin is shown as modest, cautious, retiring. It actually makes him sick to his stomach to realize how his idea will upset his wife and family, the Anglican Church, the Established Order. What was this marvelous discovery? Natural selection. It supposedly shows how "purposeless, meaningless matter in motion," to quote Dennett again, could whirl itself into bees, butterflies, and bears, without any need for a designer. Less admiringly, the philosopher Bertrand Russell years ago called natural selection "the application of laissez-faire economics to the animal and vegetable kingdoms." Remarkably, both Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace thought of natural selection independently at the same time, both having read the same book by the free-market economist, Thomas Malthus.

By analogy, Darwin imputed competition, or "the struggle for existence," to nature. It is said of Darwin that he was under the impression he had found the evidence for evolution in the Galapagos Islands but actually "saw" it in the smoking chimneys of the Victorian era. We are duly shown the finches of the Galapagos Islands, and beaks are ostentatiously measured for our edification. These famed finches are not mentioned in Darwin's Origin of Species and played little or no role in the formulation of evolutionary theory. But the PBS authors manage to extrapolate from unequal beaks to a unified Tree of Life, in which the common descent of all life from a single starting point is alleged. PBS supplies the missing evidence with onscreen animation. This is ideology masquerading as science.

In the first segment, Harvard's Stephen Jay Gould says of selection: "The survivors are those whose variations fortuitously adapt them to better changing local environments, and then, because they pass on those traits to their offspring, the population changes. That's natural selection. It's all it is." This amounts to the claim that nature produces variations, some of which survive and leave offspring, and others of which do not. As an explanation for the existence of creatures so complex that we cannot begin to make the slightest parts of them in our highest-tech labs, this leaves something to be desired.

next page... |  1 of 3

share this page

September 3 2001, Vol. 45, No. 11