Here's a review of the series from the Seattle Weekly:
Published September 20 - 26, 2001Making sense of life
BY ROGER DOWNEY
NEXT MONDAY, Sept. 24, the Public Broadcasting System "pops out" its new season with a four-night, seven-part documentary called Evolution. Both PBS and the makers of the film, Paul Allen's Blue Sky Productions, had every reason to expect the show to attract a lot of attention, favorable and otherwise.
It's hard, now, to know what people will feel like watching two weeks after the events of Sept. 11. Maybe eight hours' cautious exposition of the mechanisms governing the elaboration of living things through time will seem irrelevant. Just as possibly, people looking for some way of making sense of their world will be drawn to a thorough airing of the central philosophico-scientific issue of our time.
The most memorable PBS documentaries--Clark's Civilization, Bronowski's Ascent of Man, Sagan's Cosmos--have been author driven, with every word, image, and idea reflecting a single shaping mind. Evolution doesn't have that kind of focus: A committee of eminent scientists was asked to determine its agenda, and different writers, directors, and producers were hired to create episodes illustrating the themes selected. Of the three episodes I saw in advance of broadcast, the first and most ambitious is also the weakest: Shot in period-Masterpiece Theatre style, it's a earnest Darwin biopic (lumbered with sub-Cliffs Notes dialogue) interrupted erratically by eminent Darwinians of our own day (most prominent among them Harvard's Stephen Jay Gould, who'll be lecturing in Seattle on Oct. 2, the gods and the FAA willing).
Five of the remaining episodes hew closely to answering a single big question posed and answered by evolutionary science: How does evolution "work"? What role has extinction played in the history of life? What role does competition between organisms play in the process? If evolution is a mindless, random process, where the hell did mind come from?
To judge by the evidence of episode five, these more focused segments work better, both as instruction and entertainment. "Why Sex?" adopts a jokey but, on the whole, sensible and down-to-earth tone in explaining what evolutionary thinking has taught us about why sex exists at all, how it's shaped the history of life on earth, and why men and women see the world differently.
Only in its final hour does the series confront the issue which led to its making in the first place. "What About God?" attempts a sympathetic overview of all the diverse voices asking that question: "creationists"; partisans of "creation science," like Seattle Discovery Institute; and serious scientists who find no conflict between their work and their religious views.
But, as might be expected from a committee-devised treatment of a hot-button issue, the episode lacks bite, concluding (in the words of the series' promotional summary) "that science and religion are compatible, although they play very different roles in assigning order to the universe and a purpose to life." This bland formulation may have some truth to it, but not enough. It ignores the deep, if out-of-fashion, idea espoused by thinkers as different as Marx, Freud, and Shelley that belief in God is a central impediment to human progress. It also ignores those whose confidence that they have a hot line to the Almighty, from the 700 Club's Pat Robertson to the suicide pilots of the jihad, licenses them to cast out of the human community anyone who does not bow to the idols of their particular tribe.
The wishy-washy, why-can't-everybody-just-get-along formulation concluding Evolution obscures the most important concept in the series as a whole: Science, as a human activity, may be neutral when it comes to questions like "Is there a God?" or "What is the meaning of the universe?" It is not neutral on the subject of belief. On the contrary, belief--"the evidence of things not seen," as St. Paul defines it--is the enemy of science, asserting a higher claim to truth than the evidence of one's own eyes as confirmed by the eyes of others.
The national atmosphere right now is so hazy with sanctimony that one has to be grateful for any effort to address reality with candor, and this Evolution does. The attendant education initiative, centered on providing teaching materials based on the series and the book to secondary-school science classes, may, in time, have a deep and lasting influence on the way Americans think about their world. But it will face militant resistance. If they're going to win their argument with the forces of blind faith--if they're even going to hold their own--the apologists of science are going to have to stop apologizing and start fighting.
Additional information:
Nina Shapiro's Seattle Weekly article on the Discovery Institute¹s patronage of UW astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez:
http://www.seattleweekly.com/features/0116/news-shapiro.shtmlFor the conservative Christians funding the Discovery Institute's Intelligent Design campaign, see Los Angeles Times religion reporter Teresa Watanabe's "Enlisting Science to Find the Fingerprints of a Creator," published March 25, 2001. This article is available free at the Discovery Institute's own website,
http://www.discovery.org/news/EnlistingScience.htmlFor more on Clear Blue Sky Productions and Evolution,
http://www.clearblueskyfilms.com/
Evolution airs nightly at 8 p.m. Mon.-Thurs., Sept. 24-27 on KCTS 9 Seattle. Evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould addresses Seattle Arts and Lectures at Benaroya Hall, 7:30 p.m. Tues., Oct. 2. $18-$15. 621-2230.
It will be a pleasure to have something else to talk about on FR.
Also, does anyone want to place a bet on how soon someone will post the famous list of links of CrEv debate material?
But I'm probably not going to hang around this topic too much unless the news from Afghanistan slows down. That's okay, because none of you will miss one more voice SHOUTING in the squabble. Besides, it's not as if I have some evidence that everyone else has somehow overlooked...
"Evolution: A Series on PBS tonight"
Fitting that a series on evolution should be run on state-sponsored television, otherwise known as the network whose initials stand for Pure B.S.
Fitting, indeed.
http://www.reviewevolution.org/getOurGuide.php
Here's a thorough criticism of the series in PDF form from the Discovery Institute. You can download the long PDF file and then read the Executive Summary to get the gist of it.
Here are the main criticisms of the series:
A) Its failure to present accurately and fairly the scientific problems with the evidence for Darwinian evolution.
B) Its systematic omission of disagreements among evolutionary biologists themselves about central claims in the series, and its complete failure to report the views of scientists who dispute Darwinism at its roots.
C) Its excessive biased focus on religion, despite its insistence to be about science rather than "the religious realm."
D) Its inappropriate use by PBS, a government-funded agency, to organize and promote a controversial political action agenda.
1. an assumption of impossibility is made 2. What is left *must* be the truth, however impossible.
Neither Creationism nor Evolutionism is less probable or more provable. Both are matters of faith, in the end. Because evolutionists also come down to the point where they cannot explain something crucial to the argument, just as Creationists do.
The question then becomes, why does one person make the assumption that there *is* a personal creator, and the other person does not? What is the motivation behind the decision?
However, although everything in the Bible is inspired, not all is revealed. As I study the Bible, I try to understand the context in which it was written, as well as the type of literary form used (allegory, parable, oration, etc).
I believe the Hebrew authors, while divinely inspired, were free to choose their literary forms to convey God's message of revelation and salvation. The forms were certainly conditioned by their time and culture. The story of the origins of the earth and primeval man were expressed in terms designed to reveal to the people of that time the majesty of God's creation, not as a scientific textbook.
I believe that God's gave man a wonderful gift of intellect, but it is necessarily limited. After all, He is God, and man is not. Man will always use that intellect to try to learn more and more about the origins of life, and I am as curious as the next person.
However, I believe that perfect understanding will only come when I am at one with God after my time here on earth. In the meantime, faith is needed, and freely given upon request, for me to be entirely comfortable with the belief that that there can be no contradiction between truth and God.
Although I enjoyed the PBS show this evening, I do wish that the producers of the show would have, at least once, said that all they showed is a hypothesis, not proven fact.
If the first human was truly the only human, would he have mated with his ancestor? Could that happen if they were no longer the same species? If this first human could sucessfully mate with only primates, and his offspring could only mate with primates, and their offspring could only mate with primates- how did they become human? Please advise. I'm confused.