Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id OAA08006 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-bounces@mmu.ac.uk); Tue, 25 Sep 2001 14:33:58 +0100 Subject: Re: Evolution on PBS Date: Tue, 25 Sep 2001 09:24:15 -0400 x-sender: wsmith1@camail2.harvard.edu x-mailer: Claris Emailer 2.0v3, Claritas Est Veritas From: "Wade T.Smith" <wade_smith@harvard.edu> To: "memetics list" <memetics@mmu.ac.uk> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Message-ID: <20010925132459.AAA3856@camailp.harvard.edu@[128.103.125.215]> Sender: fmb-bounces@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
On 09/25/01 08:27, Derek Gatherer said this-
>a) if it got more controversial towards the end?
>b) if memes were mentioned
>c) when exactly did it end?
It ended (this introductory segment was two hours long) at 2200, and,
yes, PBS is somewhat synchronized. The program was also immediately
rebroadcast, on our local station, WGBH, and many PBS stations do that as
well.
Memes were not mentioned, although I also did not follow it entirely to
the end, being somewhat annoyed by the format and period pieces. I did
not, for instance, get to see Dennett, although they stole his title
without, as far as I could see, any acknowledgment.
And, it seems to want to avoid controversy, unhappily.
Here's a review from Slate-
- Wade
PS- I understand that Thursday's segment will have some hot footage of
bonobos....
*******
http://slate.msn.com/culturebox/entries/01-09-24_115965.asp
Darwin's Sanitized Idea
PBS's Evolution is an exercise in creationist appeasement.
By Chris Mooney
Monday, Sept. 24, 2001, at 12:30 p.m. PT
Evolution, the glitzy seven-part PBS miniseries airing Sept. 24-27, is
surely the most comprehensive presentation of Darwin's theory yet offered
by the American mass media. Its motto may be best expressed by Chris
Schneider, a Boston University biologist interviewed while collecting
specimens in the Ecuadorean rain forest: "Darwin really got it right!"
And in its exploration of topics like the role of natural selection in
battling HIV and the importance of sex to genetic diversity, Evolution
repeatedly demonstrates the wide applicability of Darwin's theory.
But PBS's mainstreaming of Darwinism also trims back some of the theory's
more controversial implications. Evolution flatly denies equal time to
Darwin's religiously based rivals, Creationism and intelligent design
theory, yet the program repeatedly argues that evolution and religion are
compatible. If you eat Darwin's theory for your main course, Harvard
paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould and others seem to say, you can have
religion for dessert. (Slate's Robert Wright has accused Stephen Jay
Gould of abetting Creationism. Click here for the charges.)
In this, Evolution fits into the modern "science and religion"
reconciliation movement. The leading booster behind this trend has been
Sir John Templeton, a retired financier who has, to be blunt, more money
than God. Templeton's foundation funds institutes, research, and
conferences, and presents the annual Templeton Prize for Progress in
Religion, an award deliberately set at a monetary value exceeding the
Nobel Prize and frequently given to a religious scientist. This year's
prize went to Dr. Arthur Peacocke, an Oxford physical biochemist and
Anglican priest and a "leading advocate for the creative interaction of
theology and science." The quotation comes from a Templeton press
release, but is copied verbatim in Evolution's promotional materials:
Like Gould, Peacocke is a spokesman for the series.
In the actual series, however, it is the Brown University biologist
Kenneth Miller who serves as the most outspoken proponent of a
Templetonian reconciliation between evolution and religion. The author of
Finding Darwin's God but a fierce foe of Creationism, Miller describes
himself as "an orthodox Catholic and an orthodox Darwinist." In
Evolution's first installment, titled "Darwin's Dangerous Idea," we watch
Miller in church, bowing his head and holding out his palms as a priest
intones, "Our Father, who art in heaven" Miller's notion of God? "He's
the guy who made up the rules of the game, and he manages to act within
those rules."
Miller and Gould's reconciliationist position seems custom designed to
answer fundamentalist claims that by teaching evolution the public
schools inculcate atheism. After the Columbine High School shootings, for
example, the House Republican whip Tom DeLay warned that we should expect
more tragedies so long as "our school systems teach children that they
are nothing but glorified apes who are evolutionized [sic] out of some
primordial soup of mud." Reading quotations like that, it's easy to see
how evolutionists would worry that, in a country where over 90 percent of
people believe in God, evolution had better find some way of getting
along with religion.
Yet the fundamentalists seem to be exactly right about the religious
implications of the study of evolution. Sure, Kenneth Miller can separate
his scientific research and his religious beliefs. But few top scientists
actually do so. In 1998 in the journal Nature, the historian Edward
Larson and Washington Times religion writer Larry Witham reported the
results of their survey of the religious views of National Academy of
Sciences members. Nine out of 10 were atheists or agnostics, and among
NAS biologists, just 5.6 percent believed in God, the lowest percentage
for any scientific field. Larson and Witham quoted the Oxford scientist
Peter Atkins: "You clearly can be a scientist and have religious beliefs.
But I don't think you can be a real scientist in the deepest sense of the
word because they are such alien categories of knowledge."
Atkins' point comes across clearly in Evolution's final segment, titled
"What About God?" The documentary visits the evangelical Wheaton College
and interviews science students struggling to reconcile what they know of
evolution with their fundamentalist upbringings. The students come across
as genuinely intellectually motivated, and they ask good questions, but
Wheaton lays down clear parameters for their discussions. The college
requires all its faculty members to sign a statement affirming their
belief in the literal existence of Adam and Eve. Given this dogmatic
precondition for intellectual inquiry on its campus - where one student
describes endorsing evolution as "like coming out of the closet almost"-
Wheaton actually counts as a rather stunning counterexample to the notion
of a reconciliation between science and religion.
Evolution's attempt to divorce Darwinian science from atheism, though
well intentioned, is finally naive. Darwinism presents an explanation for
life's origins that lacks any supernatural element and emphasizes a cruel
and violent process of natural selection that is tough to square with the
notion of a benevolent God. Because of this, many students who study
evolution will find themselves questioning the religions they have grown
up with. What's insidious is that Evolution allows fundamentalists to say
this, but not evolutionists. The miniseries interviews several experts
who could be expected to oppose the reconciliation outlook, notably
Daniel Dennett, author of Darwin's Dangerous Idea, and the Oxford
biologist Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene, who has written,
"Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist." But
neither Dennett nor Dawkins gets much of a say on the topic of religion.
Evolution closes its first and last episodes with a reading of the last
sentence of On the Origin of Species:
"There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having
been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and
that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed laws
of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and
most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved."
The series repeatedly frames this passage as evidence of Darwin's
"fundamentally religious" view of nature. But later in life Darwin
explicitly disavowed this view of nature's "grandeur." Furthermore, the
words "by the Creator" only showed up in the second edition of the
Origin, released several weeks after the first. Why this change? Because
after Darwin came under vicious attack for his views - science versus
religion - he went back and stuck in references to God as a form of
appeasement. Evolution, possibly unaware of the Origin's different texts,
uses the original sentence at the close of "Darwin's Dangerous Idea" but
the more godly version at the close of "What About God?"
After the publication of the Origin, Darwin steadily grew even more
skeptical. In his autobiography, begun in 1876, he puzzled through
various arguments for the existence of God, but finally concluded, "I for
one must be content to remain an Agnostic." PBS never cites this passage,
perhaps because it puts Darwin far closer to Daniel Dennett and Richard
Dawkins than rare theistic evolutionists like Kenneth Miller. The series
strives to present a charming picture of a scientific theory that leaves
religion relatively unchallenged, but Darwin's life itself suggests
otherwise.
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