About two weeks ago I wrote that I’d received a DVD from young-earth creationist (and Discovery Institute member) Paul Nelson, a copy of the movie “Darwin’s Dilemma.” And you may recall that this movie created a bit of a stink in Los Angeles when the California Science Center, realizing that it had committed to showing that stealth-creationist movie, tried to back out.
Well, I have dutifully watched all 72 minutes of the film (a duty akin to cleaning the refrigerator: it has to be done, but it isn’t fun). The verdict: a stinker. It’s a well-produced movie whose goal is to show that the Cambrian “explosion,” along with a few ancillary “facts,” prove that evolution is wrong and that intelligent design is the best explanation for not only the sudden appearance of animal phyla at the beginning of the Cambrian, but for all of life in general.
The good stuff: the animations of the Burgess shale animals: Wiwaxia, Marrella, and the like.
The bad stuff: everything else.
It’s a breathlessly duplicitous movie, enlisting scientists like Simon Conway Morris and James Valentine, who (I think) accept evolution, into implicitly endorsing ID by their very appearance in the movie. Either these scientists are secret IDers, or, more likely, they agreed to appear without knowing that the movie would be a vehicle for creationism.
But you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out who’s behind the movie, for if they’d merely Googled the movie producer, Illustra Media, they’d find very quickly that it appears to be identical to Discovery Media, an explictly creationist/religious outfit. Lesson to scientists: don’t agree to appear on film unless you have absolute confidence in who is making the movie. Conway Morris, for one, apparently has some sympathies for creationism, since he’s floated the argument that evolution is driven by God.
The movie repeatedly hammers home the message that the sudden appearance of all “animal forms” at the Cambrian boundary contradicts evolution’s central tenet that things evolve gradually from ancestors who were different. This is “Darwin’s dilemma” of the movie’s title. No matter that trace fossils and some remains of animals appear before the Burgess Shale fauna, so that that fauna didn’t represent the first animal life on Earth, and no matter that the “Cambrian explosion” was not instantaneous, but lasted between 5 and 20 million years. No, the film states that the animals arose instantaneously and implies (but does not state) that this reflects God’s creation. (They call it instead “a burst of creativity”.)
Besides Conway Morris and Valentine, several more dubious characters appear as talking heads. Courtesy of The Discovery Institute, we get Jon Wells, Paul Nelson, and Stephen Meyer, all dolled up in jackets and trying to talk like real scientists. Also supporting their cause is somebody new to me, University of California at San Francisco biologist Paul Chien, also happens to be a Discovery Institute Fellow. Dr. Chien claims that the Cambrian explosion is a “quantum jump” that has “no explanation” (well, there are lots of explanations, just not a solution yet!). And Jon Wells, lying as usual, says that the explosion “could have happened overnight.” Note to Wells: no, it coudn’t.
Two other scary people appear: Doug Axe and Richard Sternberg, the former new to me, the latter involved in the big mess about the publication of Meyer’s ID paper in a peer-reviewed journal. Both are shown as working at The Biologic Institute, a spinoff of the Discovery Institute ostensibly involved in scientific research, but whose scientific credibility is demonstrated by the presence of several young-earth creationists on board. (See Celeste Biever’s exposé of this place in New Scientist.)
A few comments on the content:
1. The movie repeatedly states that life has a long history and originated 3.5 billion years ago. It accepts the geological eras and their dates. So why on earth is Paul Nelson in it, since as a young-earth creationist he explicitly rejects all this? ID people always want to present a united front on the age of life, and they’ve decided (which they must do so they don’t look like complete morons) to accept its ancient age. But here I fault Paul Nelson (and the Discovery Institute in general) for hypocrisy.
2. The movie not only claims that there were no transitional forms representing the ancestors of the Cambrian fauna, but implies that there are no transitional forms in general. That is, of course, a lie. We have transitional forms between fish and amphibians, amphibians and reptiles, reptiles and mammals, dinosaurs and birds, land mammals to whales and seals, and so on. If sudden appearance reflects the actions of a Designer, then how do IDers explain these transitional forms? Did they — God help us — evolve?
3. And what about those vertebrates, like mammals, who appeared later? And what about the flowering plants, which didn’t evolve until about 200 million years ago, more than 300 million years after the Cambrian explosion? Did God have some afterthoughts?
4. The film presents a few other arguments for intelligent design. One is the sudden appearance, supposedly fully formed, of phyla (characterized by their possession of novel “body plans) at the Cambrian boundary, rather than species, which, according to evolutionary biology, should appear before phyla, diverging only later to form the more inclusive groups. The film argues that the “top down” pattern is precisely what is expected if life resulted from a designing intelligence: humans, who are conscious designer, use a top-down strategy in their creations. Automobiles, for example, have retained the original design of an engine, four wheels, etc., while varying only in detail as time progressed.
This is a clever argument, but of course fails when we have a good fossil record, as in the evolution of mammals from reptiles or of amphibians from fish. We don’t see fully-evolved mammals appearing suddenly in the fossil record, later spinning off the various groups of modern mammals. Rather, we see a gradual divergence of mammal-like reptiles from reptile-like reptiles, with the major groups of mammals forming later.
And Meyer and his cronies claim, as expected, that the information to create new body plans through development simply can’t have arisen through random mutation and selection. (For a good refutation of this idea, see Kenneth Miller’s books, Only a Theory and Finding Darwin’s God.) Richard Sternberg further argues that the fact of development itself is beyond evolutionary explanation, for development requires “another level of information” beyond that stored in the DNA. That’s not true either, for DNA codes for proteins that, once formed, self-assemble into organisms. (See Richard Dawkins’s new book, The Greatest Show on Earth, for a lucid explanation of how this happens.)
Darwin’s Dilemma is a slick package designed to deceive the viewer by pretending that the facts, and the scientific consensus, are against the tenets of evolutionary theory. It hides the real facts, suborns genuine scientists, and, above all, pretends that it’s motivated not by religion, but by concern for truth.
Sometimes I wish there were a God, just so jokers like this could face Him after death and hear these words: “I never asked you to lie in my name.”
Fig. 1. They found some of Gene Simmons’s DNA in there too.