From: Wade Hines Newsgroups: talk.origins Subject: WGBH's Evolution: no method, what message? Date: 28 Sep 2001 00:47:10 -0400 Organization: The University of Ediacara Lines: 79 Message-ID: <3BB40081.D5906B1@rcn.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: darwin.ediacara.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Complaints-To: abuse@rcn.com NNTP-Posting-Date: 28 Sep 2001 04:46:57 GMT X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.72 [en] (Win95; U) X-Accept-Language: en WGBH's series "Evolution" has certainly been met with mixed reviews. It has been attacked before it aired by the likes of the Discovery Institute. There are those who have expressed their admiration for the show in this forum including for instance kudos for the first episode from those who have closely studied Darwin's life despite their ability to point out multiple mistakes. But I'm also struck with the broad dissatisfaction from both experts and non experts with the series, counting myself as one of the lesser experts. Why? From the pbs website we have the following: Evolution determines who lives, who dies, and who passes traits on to the next generation. The process plays a critical role in our daily lives, yet it is one of the most overlooked -- and misunderstood -- concepts ever described. The Evolution project's eight-hour television miniseries travels the world to examine evolutionary science and the profound effect it has had on society and culture. From the genius and torment of Charles Darwin to the scientific revolution that spawned the tree of life, from the power of sex to drive evolutionary change to the importance of mass extinctions in the birth of new species, the Evolution series brings this fascinating process to life. The series also explores the emergence of consciousness, the origin and success of humans, and the perceived conflict between science and religion in understanding life on Earth. The Evolution series' goals are to heighten public understanding of evolution and how it works, to dispel common misunderstandings about the process, and to illuminate why it is relevant to all of us. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/about/overview.html It's a flawed beginning. Evolution does not determine who lives and dies, evolution is a consequence of who lives(to reproduce). They have the cart before the horse. Frankly similarly muddled thinking permeates the series. If this is the standard of evolution being broadly taught, the creationists not only will have an easy time of it, they have reasons to be unconvinced. If one leaps to the statement of goals, I'm afraid the series misfired there too. I've missed two segments but unless they are broadly different, "how it works" has been generally ignored except in the very broadest sense dependent wholly on believing the talking heads (or labcoats). A thinking viewer wasn't given much to think about, just things to agree with or disagree with. As to dispelling misconceptions, where was that done? In the last episode they presented vignettes of different people saying what they believed and a few students expressing rather haphazard lines of thought. That dinners not finished so we should let them finish cooking their thoughts but where were their questions explored? Ken Ham got to present his beliefs about fossils and a geologist got to say something about the geologic column but none of the reasons they claim what they claim were explored at all. We got teachers being dismayed that their good students seemed to fail to understand what science was, that they think creationism isn't science but no reasons why. It was left as he said/she said. If the anti-evolutionists say that the program had a clear pro evolution bias and made the creationists look like fools I can't disagree but worse they did it without actually using any scientific reasons or reasoning. Ken Ham is shown priming his kids to respond to "millions of years" with "were you there"? Yes he was generally disregarded but did they touch on how science does lots of things where nobody was there? Archeology, including excavation of biblically referenced sites that creationists will cite of "proof" of the bible, is accepted as science by creationists even if the archeologists weren't there "thousands of years" ago. If the goal was to dispel common misunderstandings, I'm afraid they missed the net.