A remarkable thing about last night’s first episode of the new NOVA PBS series, Evolution, is how much science and scientific debate it elides through judicious deployment of verbs that assert a great deal, in the vaguest terms, without explaining anything. The main subject was the evolution of high intelligence through the ancestors leading up to dolphins.
Take a Deep Breath
In evolution, we are told, things “lead to,” “trigger,” “arrive,” “drive,” “change,” “develop,” “arise,” and “happen.” Take a deep breath and see if you notice the pattern here:
“The virus led to,” “it triggers one of the fish’s genes to go into overdrive,” “the forces that led to the earliest brains,” “eyes, as we know them, have arrived,” “visual systems would definitely drive the evolution of a brain,” “relentlessly, brains are driven to expand,” “mutations drive the dimples to become deeper,” “touch and smell also helped drive the evolution of early brains,” “the sense that had helped drive much of the evolution of the brain,” “senses sharpening to the night that scientists think helped drive a monumental change in the brains of those cynodonts,” “driven to expand,” “this ability to sense light with retinal will change everything,” “eyes change the dynamics of life,” “it has changed the way their entire bodies are built,” “they change how the brain functions forever,” “the brain changes shape,” “their brains began to change,” “the first nervous systems arise,” “we see a huge diversity of eyes start to develop,” “one group starts to develop,” “the other groups like the prey might develop,” “thus more evolutionary pressure on the brain to develop,” “a game-changing region of the brain develops,” “mammalian brains keep developing,” “the early stages of eye evolution were happening,” “a bizarre fluke of biology that happened in the ancient seas,” “happened many times.”
In other words, evolution occurs because of evolution. The only lame excuse for an actual explanation of what “drives” it all is “chance”: “the chance events that rewired ancient brains.”
As evolutionary biologist Richard Buggs notes about the previously aired and somewhat different BBC version (how different the source material is remains to be seen), the series will of course be adopted by teachers as a staple in schools. And all the elision — the misleading and the uncritical simplification where in reality fierce scientific debate goes on without end — can then be placed in the drinking water of any young person with enough patience to sit through an hour of talking professors and slick computer-generated animations. More on this to come.