This is a promotional video for CSIRO, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization. When I meet any Australian scientist in the future, I will be expecting them to break into song.
Be warned, this tribute is a song in Satan’s genre, that loud rock music.
Feel like watching a little TV tonight? PBS is showing a new Nova tonight, Darwin’s Darkest Hour, which looks to be about his worries about publishing his theory.
Just not a very good one, but you’ll see for yourselves. I spent the morning in heaven, which consists of a well-lit white screen in Southern California, trying to master my lines for a future Mr Deity episode. That stuff is harder than it looks. We went through many takes while my brain was freezing up at inopportune moments — there’s a reason not everyone is a movie star, that’s for sure.
Anyway, “Lucy” and “Mr Deity” are actually Amy and Bryan, and they have a nice house with a couple of kids, two dogs, and a cat, and the episodes are filmed in the family room. I hope I haven’t shattered any of your illusions. Amy made me pancakes, I think because she’s very nice, but it might also have been to load up the klutzy professor’s sputtering brain with carbohydrates so that maybe he’d remember his lines.
I made it through it all, though, and I’m hoping that Mr Deity will be able to work a miracle and make me look good with some creative editing. You’ll probably see the results next week. It can’t possibly be worse than Expelled!
By the way, he mentioned that they’re hoping to build up the budget to make a half-hour pilot, which would be awesome — Mr Deity as weekly dose of broadcast irreverence for American living rooms would be an excellent and entertaining corrective. Support them if you can!
Richard Dawkins is appearing on Colbert tonight, it should be good. In a near miss, Francis Collins is appearing tomorrow; too bad we couldn’t get a collision.
The Charlotte Pop Fest ’09 is going on right now — it’s a music festival that also raises money for charities. You should go. The recipient of the profits this year will be the Richard Dawkins Foundation.
What, you say? They’re raising money to promote secular science? In North Carolina?
Yes, they are. And the organizer, James Deem, says he is doing it to raise awareness for science and science education. I blow kisses his way — what a great idea.
Unfortunately, there are problems. Sponsors have pulled out, meaning that they had to cut some bands from the schedule, and of course, some members of the public are unhappy. You knew that was coming.
Thorne stressed that the bands are there to play music, not give out a message about atheism or anything else.
Pop Festival attendee Debbie Aintrazi of Mint Hill hopes they don’t.
“If they start going around saying, ‘no, you shouldn’t believe in this, you shouldn’t believe in that’– that’s when I [get upset],” she said. “I don’t believe in not believing.”
Wait, what did she say? I’m going to have to let the idea of not believing in not believing curdle in my brain for a bit, because it’s kind of indigestible right now.
While Ms Aintrazi is working on believing everything she hears, though, those of you near Charlotte should support this event — a swarm of enthusiastic atheists descending on the festival might convince them that supporting us and science is a good idea.
(via the Impolitic)
I like it!
I know this will set off another round of culture sniping — get over it. You don’t personally have to like this genre, just as no one has to like every kind of music out there, and turning your nose up at one form doesn’t necessarily mean your taste is better than someone else’s. Just recognize that it’s different. It’s not Mozart or Manilow, it’s just its own sound. If it helps you get over the rejection of something that doesn’t sound like the music you are familiar with, think of it as a poetry performance instead.
As for myself, most rap and hip-hop leaves me cold, but every once in a while something in it connects with me, and I can’t predict what it will be. I’ve even got some Busta Rhymes on my iPod that I really, really like…and no, I don’t have to justify it to anyone!
That new Darwin film, Creation (reviews here and here) doesn’t look like it will get to my neighborhood theater — it hasn’t got a US distributor, for familiar reasons.
A British film about Charles Darwin has failed to find a US distributor because his theory of evolution is too controversial for American audiences, according to its producer.
Creation, starring Briton Paul Bettany, details the naturalist’s “struggle between faith and reason” as he wrote On the Origin of Species.
It depicts him as a man who loses faith in God after the death of his daughter, Annie, 10.
The film was chosen to open the Toronto Film Festival and has its British premiere today. It has been sold in almost every territory around the world, from Australia to Scandinavia.
However, US distributors turned down the film that will prove divisive in a country where, according to a Gallup poll taken in February, only 39 per cent of people believe in the theory of evolution.
Movieguide.org, an influential site that reviews films from a Christian perspective, described Darwin as the father of eugenics and denounced him as “a racist, a bigot and an 1800s naturalist whose legacy is mass murder”. His “half-baked theory” influenced Adolf Hitler and led to “atrocities, crimes against humanity, cloning and genetic engineering”, the site stated.
Although, to be fair, this is only part of the story. One reason it probably isn’t getting picked up is that it isn’t a blockbuster story — it’s a small film with a personal story. That’s not to say it’s a bad movie, but it’s not a Michael Bay noisemaker with car chases and explosions, or giant robots, or a remake of a 1970s cheesy TV show. That makes it a tougher sell.
Also, while it’s going to generate a little controversy from the know-nothing brigades, it’s not a movie that embraces the controversy and makes a lot of PR waves. I suspect it’s falling into the valley of the dead movies, where it’s got just enough negative vibe to turn away a segment (a small, stupid segment, of course, but theaters don’t care about the IQ of the people buying popcorn) of the population, but not enough shock value to make it a must-see movie for the controversy alone.
There’s a new movie coming out about Darwin that does something different: instead of talking about the science of evolution, it’s about Darwin’s personal life. Roger Ebert has seen it and offers a few thoughts on the subject matter (it isn’t a review, though!), and it sounds interesting — I’ll be seeing it if it appears in Morris, which isn’t likely, or when it’s available on DVD, which is much more likely. I’m not worried that it will provide comfort to creationists, but I am a little concerned that it may Hollywoodize history a little bit.
Ebert points out that it focuses on the difficulties he had with religion, and how it colored his marriage and work. I don’t know how well it represents reality, though. It’s a lens we use to look back on the 19th century, but it may not be entirely fair to Darwin’s views.
Fearing to offend his wife, he was shy about extending his belief to the evolution of mankind itself, but it is certainly what he privately thought. He denied being a atheist, but said agnosticism came close to reflecting his views. Apart from his research and ideas about science, that conflict in this marriage and with the conventional religious of his times was the most significant thing about him.
I have my doubts that the conflict with religion was a major issue with Darwin. He avoided it very effectively, and did not make public pronouncements on religious belief. He differed from his wife’s opinion, but here’s the thing: there isn’t the slightest hint in any of his writings that he was even tempted to disagree with Emma, and the impression I get is that at every step his priority was to accommodate his ideas with his wife’s beliefs.
Yes, I said it: Charles Darwin was an accommodationist.
I don’t think the most significant thing in his life was the conflict with religion at all — his family and his happy relationship with his wife and children was #1, and I don’t think ‘conflict’ was a word that applied (although, of course, it would have to be emphasized in a movie).
It also leaves something out: Darwin himself said that his greatest talent was as a businessman. Over his lifetime, he invested carefully and wisely and grew a small seed of money given at his marriage into a huge fortune. If anyone wants to sort out what contributed most to his scientific work, I think that fact should loom much larger than a slight tension on matters of religion in which he always deferred to his wife.
