Give me creaturely over preacherly any day

You can tell when a dogmatic theist has to review a book by an unapologetic atheist: there’s a lot of indignant spluttering, and soon the poor fellow is looking for an excuse to dismiss the whole exercise, so that he doesn’t have to actually think about the issues. That’s the case with Leon Wieseltier’s review of Dennett’s Breaking the Spell—it’s kind of like watching a beached fish gasp and flounder, yet at the same time he apparently believes he’s the one with the gaff hook and club.

It’s full of self-important declarations that reduce to incoherence, such as this one:

You cannot disprove a belief unless you disprove its content. If you believe that you can disprove it any other way, by describing its origins or by describing its consequences, then you do not believe in reason. In this profound sense, Dennett does not believe in reason. He will be outraged to hear this, since he regards himself as a giant of rationalism. But the reason he imputes to the human creatures depicted in his book is merely a creaturely reason. Dennett’s natural history does not deny reason, it animalizes reason.

One moment he’s telling us that just tracing the origins of an idea is insufficient to disprove it (sadly for Mr Wieseltier’s argument, there is no sign that Dennett disagrees), the next he’s telling us that the origin of Dennett’s reason is “creaturely” and “animalized”, and therefore of a lesser or invalid kind. I had no idea we could categorize reason by the nature of its source (I’d like to know what varieties of reason he proposes: “creaturely”, “human”, “divine”? Is there also a “vegetable reason”?), but even if we could, by his initial premise, it wouldn’t matter: he needs to address its content, not carp against it because it is the product of natural selection rather than revelation.

Then there’s this rather bewildering build-up. Wieseltier carefully builds a case that he has caught Dennett in an internal contradiction, an idea he pounces on with a kind of petty triumphal glee…but all it shows is that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

Like many biological reductionists, Dennett is sure that he is not a biological reductionist. But the charge is proved as early as the fourth page of his book. Watch closely. “Like other animals,” the confused passage begins, “we have built-in desires to reproduce and to do pretty much whatever it takes to achieve this goal.” No confusion there, and no offense. It is incontrovertible that we are animals. The sentence continues: “But we also have creeds, and the ability to transcend our genetic imperatives.” A sterling observation, and the beginning of humanism. And then more, in the same fine antideterministic vein: “This fact does make us different.”

Then suddenly there is this: “But it is itself a biological fact, visible to natural science, and something that requires an explanation from natural science.” As the ancient rabbis used to say, have your ears heard what your mouth has spoken? Dennett does not see that he has taken his humanism back. Why is our independence from biology a fact of biology? And if it is a fact of biology, then we are not independent of biology. If our creeds are an expression of our animality, if they require an explanation from natural science, then we have not transcended our genetic imperatives. The human difference, in Dennett’s telling, is a difference in degree, not a difference in kind—a doctrine that may quite plausibly be called biological reductionism.

To declare that we are not limited by our genetic imperatives does not in any way contradict the statement that we are material, biological beings with behaviors that can be explained scientifically, without recourse to the supernatural or any other kind of immaterial vitalism. Opposing simplistic genetic reductionism—which, by the way, is good to see from Dennett, because he has a bit of a reputation for being far too narrowly reductionist in his views—is not the same as denying a natural, biological basis for behavior. When Wieseltier tries to insist that genetic determinism is the same as biology, he’s just flaunting his own ignorance.

The whole review reads this poorly, and I suppose I could take it on paragraph by paragraph…but nah. Brian Leiter has already torpedoed it, so even this much seems like excess. The New York Times really needs to do a better job of finding qualified reviewers—it seems in this case they just found a guy anxious to posture against the ungodly, with no competence to actually judge the book.

Underworld: Evolution

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Dr Beckinsale visits the Discovery Institute

I saw the movie Underworld: Evolution last night. Stop looking at me like that—it was research. It has the word “evolution” in the title, doesn’t it? Besides, I have this idea to improve the promotion of science by having all of our spokespeople be dangerously nubile armed women with good cheekbones, full lips, and very sharp teeth. I figure the two things we’ve been lacking in our presentations to the public are lust and fear, and if we can just bring those into play, we’ll have an unbeatable combination.

As I learned at this movie, too, if you’ve got gorgeous women and slimy, ravening beasts confronting each other with big guns, nothing in the story has to make any sense at all. There was no plot: instead, there are a series of set-pieces strung together in which Our Heroine is placed in someplace dark, wet, and seedy with a supply of weapons and hapless allies/fang fodder to confront a suitably snouty or batty SFX playtoy. They aren’t even consistent in how these conflicts are resolved. Big bad immortal vampires get shot multiple times at point blank range with a shotgun, and shake it off with a snarl; but when Sir Derek Jacobi, following in the fine British tradition of slumming in some well-paying American trash, finds the movie so embarrassingly bad that he has to get out, the movie makers decide that the way to have his immortal character die is to poke him with something pointy, followed by a languorous death scene in which Jacobi completely turns off his ability to act. It was impressively flat, a cinematic vampire death scene that ranks right up there with Pee Wee Herman’s in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, yet utterly different.

Somehow this murky, muddled mess of a movie got made, and got people (like, say, me!) to attend. There’s a lesson here.

I’m going to have to get a skin-tight vinyl body suit for my next presentation.

I’ll let you guess whether I’m trying to inspire lust or fear.

No thanks, MPR

I often listen to Minnesota Public Radio on my drives to Minneapolis and back—I’ve got the 3 stations memorized (88.5, 88.9, and 91.1), and know where each one cuts out and I need to switch to the closer transmitter. My only complaint is the annoying, chirpy fund drives, which always drive me to fumble for some ‘foreign’ station…and that’s difficult. Here in the western part of the state most of what you find are country western and gospel and horrid pop rock stuff.

Now I have another reason to be irritated at those repetitive pleas for me to fork over a hundred bucks for a travel mug and the undying love of a radio executive. I’m with Jambo, who isn’t going to cough up a dime to them.

On the 2004 tax return, MPR listed the names and salaries of 13 officers or trustees, 12 of whom earned more than $100,000. [President and CEO, William] Kling received $326,700 in salary, pension and benefits, and incentive compensation at MPR. He earns roughly an additional $218,000 from American Public Media Group, the parent company of MPR.

A salary of half a million dollars? At a non-profit?

A good day to get a day pass

There are several items of note at Salon today, so if you don’t subscribe, watch the little commercial, you’ll get some good bang for the buck.

Why stay in NY when you can visit Morris?

You wouldn’t know it to see it, but we aim to make Morris, Minnesota the Mecca of science blogging. How else to explain how we could draw Grrlscientist away from that boring dump of a town, New York, to visit our lovely prairie village for a week? It’s true: a whole two of us ScienceBlogs people are chattering away from this lonely outpost in the rural wilderness.

Any other science bloggers who want to stop on by, feel free. We’ve got a roomy house with a zippy wireless connection, and who needs anything more? Jay Manifold has been here, Radagast once drove by within a few hundred miles, and now we’re hosting Living the Scientific Life…I think that’s enough to qualify as a Mecca, right?

Anyway, we’re planning to cruise into Minneapolis tomorrow, see the Big City, and check out Drinking Liberally at the 331 Club around about 6—somebody alert the Power Liberal, Tild, and the Wege…we got some tough-talkin’, crazed scientists planning to crash their party.

We’re also hosting an event of our own here at Chez Myers on Friday, with the first
SOFA (Something On Friday Afternoon, a Morris tradition) of the semester at our place. If anyone wants to crash our party, just come on by.

In which I dwell on the flaws in King Kong

In Peter Jackson’s Return of the King, there was a spectacular scene in which the elf Legolas single-handedly takes out a giant war elephant, first dispatching the entire crew riding its back, then firing a couple of arrows into its skull. Finally, with cool aplomb, he slides down the dying beast’s trunk, looking like a skateboarder doing a simple skid. He isn’t just a superlative shot with a bow, he has a semi-automatic bow and arrow and can take out entire platoons and mega-monsters without breaking a sweat.

I hate that scene.

It represents the worst of fanboy juvenilia—the hero inflated to god-like status, his actions no longer tethered by mere physics but become an exercise in supernatural wish fulfillment. It’s how comic book series die; not by closure of a good story, but by the steady pumping up of the central character until it becomes so central to the meaning of the entire universe that the only conflict is between the demiurge’s desires and the believability of the story’s reality. It’s damned boring stuff.

Peter Jackson showed some painful signs of susceptibility to that fanboy disease in the Lord of the Rings, and now having seen King Kong, I can say that he almost ruins the whole movie with ridiculous excess. Almost. There’s a great movie in the beginning and end of the story, and a ridiculous Dungeons & Dragons monster hunt with an indulgent Dungeon Master in the middle. The ending was so good I walked out of the theater feeling terrific about the whole show, but after thinking about it, there was an awful lot of crap going down through most of the movie.

A good science fiction story usually postulates one important novelty, and explores how that difference from the real world ramifies and causes complex consequences. There’s a wonderful, simple story in King Kong: that amazing giant ape, the interactions between him and a girl, and the disastrous collision with civilization. It’s Tarzan rewritten as a tragedy. That part is beautifully done in the movie, and Kong is a sympathetic and heroic figure, while Anne Darrow is empathy personified. That story works well.

Unfortunately, in the middle, Jackson translates a childhood fondness for the original King Kong into a kiddie cartoon. The whole Skull Island scenario is a botch.

He had to bring in the whole old bone-in-the-nose naked racism of the original; he did a great job of reveling in the wholly cruel and brutal savagery of a strangely prolific people somehow living on the rocky barren edge of an island full of monsters, in a stony city whose most common architectural features are the bones and corpses of its inhabitants. It made no sense, and was a distraction from the Kong story.

These entirely unsympathetic people are terrifying and murderous, and have the useful property of vanishing completely when the good guys fire a few guns. They are a caricature and a plot device, easily plucked off the game board whenever their presence might hamper the introduction of a new monster. They are also too easily dismissed. There is an entire city of these people, the small team of good guys have walked right into their midst, and have been completely surprised…they should have been dead. But no, the deus ex machine gun, which appears several times on Skull Island, makes the awkwardness of a massacre vanish.

“They should be dead” is a thought that ran through my mind several times. When they encounter the dinosaurs (which I thought were great, if unrealistic—they had the look of old-time Charles Knight illustrations, and their movements were beautifully slithery), they first get involved in an absurd stampede in a narrow defile. Everyone should have been dead, but instead credibility is strained overmuch with people darting in and out between legs and dancing along the edges of crumbling cliffs and bouncing off of and between and out from under tons of rubbery flesh.

There is a scene with giant bugs and some very cool sluglike beasties that were a cross between a giant leech and a chaetognath (heads full of spines, everting probosces, etc.—I want to go on record for having said “These guys have a lot of potential to be great horror movie stars” way back when. Peter, have your lawyer call my lawyer, we’ll talk). Once again, with a whole island full of giant hungry invertebrates, everyone should have been dead. But no, some survive, conveniently. (By the way, normal-sized fanged and envenomed invertebrates would have been just as lethal and scary, and far less prone to being trivially blown away with a gun.)

Once we were at the scene with the T. rex trapeze artists, my suspension of disbelief was gone completely. Laws of physics don’t matter anymore, all that mattered was how many giant flesh eaters could be squeezed onto the screen at once, and how many incredible positions and actions the CGI could render. Everyone should have been dead—people, flying and bouncing dinosaurs, gnawed-upon giant ape. Anne Darrow’s neck should have been snapped over and over again as she was tossed about like a rag doll.

The entire Skull Island sequence was like an overdone Warner Bros. cartoon, with cartoon physics, irrelevant consequences, and random rescues. It got in the way of the story. I think Jackson got so carried away with the horror monster special effects that he probably threw away most of the human parts of the tale, too…for instance, whatever happened with that subthread of James, the kid with the troubled past who was reading Heart of Darkness? Dropped and chopped to make room for more pointless creature wrestling, no doubt.

You know, Jackson could have simplified this part of the story. Forget the ghastly primitive natives; have the island contain only abandoned ruins. Drop the stupid battles between the people and dinosaurs and giant slugs; keep a few of the fights between Kong and T. rex (but having him fight 3 at a time was a bit much), since that’s part of the character’s development as an embattled loner. The capture of Kong was well done, I thought, as were the scenes with Anne and Kong, but everything with the crew and Wandering Monsters was a waste of screen time. Except, maybe, for hardcore geek fanboys.

Still, though, the last act of the movie was magnificent. It switched focus to Kong and the girl, where all the talent was any way, and although we all knew exactly what was going to happen, it was still wrenchingly done. Kong’s final torture was heartbreaking (Passion of the Ape, anyone?). The big gorilla’s character as a tragic figure was vivid, and saved the whole movie from being little more than a gussied up Friday night Sci-Fi Channel creature feature. It’s just too bad Jackson didn’t think on a slightly smaller scale for the rest.

(crossposted to The American Street)