The movie genre of the summer seems to be the superhero flick, and I’ve enjoyed most of what I’ve seen so far, but I hope Hollywood won’t forget other kinds of movies. There is one I’m really looking forward to, and the news so far seems to be that it will be true to the book: Watchmen. Oooh, it looks good.
That gadfly of the science communication world, Randy Olson, has a new movie out, Sizzle: A Global Warming Comedy, and many bloggers all over the place are putting up their reviews today. I tried something a little different. The other day, I invited a group of people from Morris, Minnesota to watch the movie with me, and then we discussed what we thought of it afterwards…while my daughter, Skatje, video taped the whole thing.
Here’s the team: Nancy Carpenter (UMM chemistry), Kristin Kearns (astronomy/physics), Pete Wyckoff (biology), Len Keeler (physics), Kathy Benson (psychology), Athena Kildegaard (poet), Kathleen and Lawrence Owen (retirees), Arne Kildegaard (economics), Nic McPhee (computer science), and me.
We all watched the movie together, and then…our reaction. It got us all going, and we talked for over 45 minutes, which I’ve edited down to 10 minutes here.
You don’t want to watch the whole thing? Well, the overall response was that, alas, the movie is mediocre as both a documentary and as a movie — it’s not really about global warming at all, but is more about how people respond to information. This is one of those awkward media misfits — it doesn’t really fit into any of the conventional niches. It also doesn’t accommodate itself to passive viewing; I think sitting alone and watching it would have been exasperating. As a catalyst for a discussion, though, it was much more rewarding.
So don’t see it alone! Bring along a few people so you can have a good entertaining argument afterwards.
I was interviewed on The Inner Side last night — if you live in Houston, you may have already heard it. If not, you can get the mp3 at that link.
Some days, my mailbox overflows with hilarity…like today. I got the new Roy Zimmerman CD! You should, too! It’ll cheer any liberal to realize that you aren’t alone, and you’ve got a theme song.
But I also get other mail that’s almost as funny, although not intentionally so. For some perverse reason, there are some of you readers out there who think you are making a statement and causing me grief by signing me up for conservative magazines and newsletters. You really shouldn’t. You know what happens? It comes in the mail, I flip through it, I laugh, and I toss it in the trash. Then when the phone call comes later, dunning me to pay for their magazine, I tell them that I don’t read it and I didn’t order it, and they get to eat the cost…and I laugh again. All you’re doing is contributing to the local landfill and hurting my mailman’s back, and that isn’t nice.
But you’re a conservative, so what the hell do you care.
Anyway, so far today I’ve received:
Assurances from a wattled, snake-eyed Newt Gingrich that Governor Bobby Jindal of Louisiana is the great future hope of American Conservatism.
An advertisement from Human Events telling me that my lungs are dying and I have to stop exercising (it’s bad for you!) and buy their supplements.
Ann Coulter tries to sell me stock tips better than the Marxist tripe the Wall Street executives are peddling.
The Zimmerman CD had some real competition on the humor side, but wins in the talent department.
All right, I think I have a decision: we will meet at 6:00pm or thereabouts on Saturday, 12 July, at Manuel’s Tavern, 602 N. Highland Ave., and have a grand old time for as long as you all can handle it. Remember, those Denverites could barely make it to 10pm — I think Georgians have to show that they can both party and offer entertaining rational conversation as good as the Coloradans gave. The honor of the South demands it!
Oh, and look: Atlanta skeptics are meeting at the same place and roughly the same time. It should be an excellent crowd.
It’s a very, very short moment, practically an aside, in a recent Dr Who episode, but there he is.
I guess Richard Dawkins has finally made it.
Did anyone else catch Saturday Night Live last night? NBC rebroadcast the very first episode with host George Carlin, and I had to watch. Saturday Night Live came out in 1975, when I first went off to college at Depauw University, and it was a major event — every Saturday night, we’d mob the TV lounge in the basement of Bishop Roberts Hall to see that show (this was in the days when no one had a TV in their room; we didn’t even have our own telephone, but shared one on each floor. I tell kids this nowadays and they don’t believe me).
The old show has acquired a nice rosy patina in my mind because it was such a fun communal event…but man, seeing it again, I realize that it really, really sucked. The skits were lame and not very funny, and sad to say, even Carlin was a bit feeble, despite his dark-haired youth, and seemed to have left his edge at home. It’s true — 90% of everything is garbage, even the happy irreverence of my first year away from home.
I’ve got all this work to get done right now, and what happens? Electronic Arts sends me the Creature Creator for their upcoming Spore video game (which is not going to be about evolution, no matter what their PR says — I’ve read the blurbs, and it’s all non-evolutionary). It is fun, though. And of course I quickly whipped up a pharyngupod:
Now I’m putting the game away. No more playing until I get back from my meetings this weekend.
As I said I would, I’m watching this History Channel documentary about the origin of life. How about a little live-blogging?
8:00. Ugh. It begins with a bunch of tripe from Coyne and Polkinghorne, claiming we need religion to understand the meaning of life. This is a bad, bad start, but I’m hoping it’s nothing but a weasely preliminary that they will then abandon to get to some real science.
There are lots of gimmicky special efects, but OK, let’s get the general audience interested. I’m not too keen on the parade of talking heads, though: they keep trotting out different investigators, letting them say a sentence or two, and then zipping off elsewhere. I know you don’t want some guy sitting and droning at you, but this seems like a poor compromise.
8:15. It’s a quick tour of the complexity of the cell. They’re using this special effects analogy of a “factory of life” where chemistry is going on.
First important element of life: metabolism. Second: life is cellular, with compartments. Third: life can replicate.
Now we get a parts catalog of polymers: lipids, proteins, and nucleic acids.
Very weird: in their factory analogy, they point to something hidden behind a big red curtain and say that that’s where all these bits and pieces come together to make something that’s alive; it seems a bit of a cop-out, a way to pretend there’s something hidden where the viewer can imagine anything they want. Come on, bite the bullet and admit it: life is chemistry, and there is nothing more.
Now we get a fairly lengthy discussion of the idea of emergence. At least they clearly state that emergence is nothing magical, but is just a consequence of the execution of the laws of nature. This is a rather pointless digression, I think.
OK, now we get a timeline of the origin of life: it appeared about 3.8 billion years ago, on a very hostile planet with no oxygen in the air, and just cooling after the last of the great meteor bombardments. This leads naturally into a discussion of extremophiles, with a tour of Mono Lake.
Segue to commercial by mentioning that life will change the environment of the earth.
8:30. Conditions on early life are hostile to us, but chemical energy is abundant. Life would have existed as single-celled forms only, which may have been unrecognizable to us (why are they showing video micrographs of nematodes while they tell us this?)
Stromatolites are introduced, as organisms that grew on chemical energy sources. What are those energy sources?
The camera crew goes spelunking. They’re collecting rock-eating microbes, which the scientists argue is a kind of primitive chemistry that evolved before photosynthesis.
Nice reminder that single-celled life was the only form of life here for 80% of the history of earth, but then they make the mistake of using the past tense in saying they were the dominant form of life on the planet.
Wait…now they’re saying that the ability to reproduce is a property of DNA? That’s kind of cutting off the possibility of an interesting discussion of alternative paths.
Suddenly, boom, they’re talking about Leeuwenhoek. Hang on, this is a bit jumpy. Can we talk more about extremophile chemistry before we start on 17th-18th century microscopy?
Now it’s all about photosynthesis. We’ve moved way, way beyond the period of early abiogenesis already, and they’ve scarcely touched on any of the major theories.
Before the commercial, we get talk about multicellularity and oxygen chemistry. Either they’re going to be jumping about an awful lot and scrambling the story, or we’re not going to get anything about abiogenic chemistry…
8:45. Oops, I had to miss part of this section to run some real-world errands. I come back to see the Burgess Shale and a discussion of the Cambrian explosion. This is long, long after the origin of life!
It’s an excuse to show some computer animations of Anomalocaris, anyway.
George Coyne does a good job now saying that life doesn’t need a designer; Polkinghorne pops up to make excuses for the metaphorical nature of the book of Genesis. Bugger off, Polkinghorne, you bother me, ya twit.
Now we get a summary of the importance of selection and sex. I don’t think we’re going to get a good review of biogenesis anymore — sex is not an important issue in that field.
I am completely baffled. Before the commercial, they say the big question was how human life arose…then they ask, “What was the specific mechanism that caused non-living chemistry into living biology?” Weird. These are very different questions. They seem to be muddling up the origins of life with the origins of the only important form of life, humans.
9:00. We’re back to animals. Come on, animals are peculiar latecomers.
Maybe it’s an excuse to return to a historical survey of ideas about the origin of life. I hope.
Aristotle proposes the idea of spontaneous generation, an idea that hangs on for centuries but is relatively easy to disprove…as Redi and Spallanzani do. This stuff isn’t bad, but it feels like introductory material they should have brought up at the beginning.
Actually, I’m enjoying this part best of all so far. They’re actually talking about the experiments done to disprove spontaneous generation, so it’s a useful summary of how scientists actually do science.
Our closing question: so how did life arise from chemistry? The second half is off to a good start, I think.
9:15. I’ve got to say…the actor playing Charles Darwin looks nothing like him, and that beard looks cheesy and fake.
We get the early concepts: “warm little pond”, “primorial soup”. There the questions are about what kind of chemicals and conditions existed at the beginning of life. They mention Oparin’s ideas about the chemical monomers available, and the idea that these chemicals would accumulate in the oceans. It seems like a very low probability sort of exercise.
The Miller/Urey experiment at last. This is well done, with a very nice illustration of the apparatus and techniques. They get it right, too — it was nice work that showed that the natural chemistry that would produce organic substrates for life was relatively trivial. It also set up unrealistic expectations for how easy it would be to create life.
Closing premise: now there is a race to figure out prebiotic chemistry.
9:30. Let’s consider other sources of organic matter!
Space-borne debris. Complex organic molecules are found in metorites and in space. We get to see scientists extracting organic molecules from ground-up meteorites. Panspermia is mentioned, but they aren’t doing a good job of distinguishing chemicals from life. At least Bob Hazen is razor sharp in pointing out that panspermia is a cop out.
Hazen also clearly explains bottom-up (exploring basic principles about biochemistry to replicate the events at the origin) vs. top-down (working in reverse from extant life backwards to the origin). He also explains that we need a multiplicity of approaches, and the origin may also have been generated from diverse sources.
Hmm. Commercials seem to be coming more frequently as we get close to the end.
9:40. It’s deep-sea vent time, with nice shots of black smokers and squid. Then Bob Hazen shows us how his experiments on the chemistry at high pressure and temperature are done. Cooking a little pyruvate for a while generates substances that form micelles.
Clays! Clays are shown as potential catalytic surfaces that would concentrate organic compounds and promote reactions that form, for instance, RNA. RNA monomers will polymerize in the presence of clays.
Transition: are scientists on the verge of creating artificial life in the lab?
9:50. It’s “3000 years after Aristotle”? What?
Never mind. Now we get pretty crystals growing and changing. This bit is a little fluffy.
All right: Jack Szostak. They describe his efforts to try and create a protocell. Cool video of creating cell membranes — beautiful little droplets bubbling out of an electrode. Some good cautionary statements: if they succeed, this will still only be a model, not a demonstration of how it actually happened 3.8 billion years ago.
They don’t really say much about the mechanisms in the closing minutes, but they do have a nice statement by Neil de Grasse Tyson about how the search is the important thing, even if we don’t get an answer.
Summary: the first hour was a muddle, and not worth watching. If you’re going to catch it later, just watch the second half.
The last half wasn’t bad. It at least talked very briefly about the actual science and how it is done. It was all painfully abbreviated and only touched lightly on the subject, but I think that is simply a limitation of the medium. I imagine it’s a seriously difficult balancing act to try and meet the needs of real nerds (like us!) and the more casual viewer, so I’ll accept the compromise.
Something at the end to lead the interested viewer to more in-depth sources would have been a good idea — they could have at least mentioned Hazen’s Genesis as a plug.
