Evolution in films 11 Nov 2010 OK, I’m giving a lecture on evolution in films. So far I have these: THEM! Godzilla, King of the Monsters King Kong The Time Machine X-Men Fantasia 2001 a space odyssey Mission To Mars Evolution Avatar Ice Age 3 – Dawn of the Dinosaurs Jurassic Park Destroy All Monsters Lost World Idiocracy Any others? Some advertisements too: Guinness “Rhythm of Life – Evolution” Evolution of Technology – HQ (Saturn Commercial) And some TV: The Simpsons – Homer Evolution Family Guy: Evolution and Creationism Evolution Pop culture Evolution
Evolution Explaining religion 4 – Wolves and gods 6 Nov 2007 The saying that “man is a wolf to man” comes from a saying of Erasmus of Rotterdam, but it is incomplete. The Latin is Homo homini aut deus aut lupus or “Man is either a god or a wolf to man”. I’m beginning to wonder if there is a difference… Read More
Cognition Evolution Quotes: Quine on evolving similarity 16 Aug 2012 A sense of comparative similarity, I remarked earlier, is one of man’s animal endowments. Insofar as it fits in with regularities of nature, so as to afford us reasonable success in our primitive inductions and expectations, it is presumably an evolutionary product of natural selection. Secondly, as remarked, one’s sense… Read More
Ecology and Biodiversity Tetrapods, species selection, and extinction 14 Dec 200818 Sep 2017 Just a couple of days ago I mentioned the Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics. They must have heard me because today I get my email notification that they have published this year’s volume. I’d like to mention three papers of interest to me. Alas, children, if you don’t… Read More
On Godzilla: Have you seen the Japanese original, Gojira? It’s much more interesting than the old American recut version. I don’t know how it compares with the recent remake, which, I assume, is the one you’ve listed.
Video games: Pokemon Films: Evolution, Parasite Eve (which is also a video game and fiction novel), Resident Evil, and Splice. TV: True Blood (sort of, I recall the vampirism and other creatures having something to do with evolution in one of the first season episodes)
TV: Heroes Sanctuary Movies: Fantastic Four (e.g., the experiment Reed Richards is conducting on the space station wrt cosmic energy triggering an evolutionary adaptation (or some-such)) The Rite of Spring from Fantasia … And way (too?) obscure: Island of Lost Souls (1932)
Here are some suggestions: The Visitor A History of Violence 28 days later Sphere The Host Species Bright Future Outbreak Star Trek Evolution (TV Episode) Star Trek Genesis The Descent Mimic Some might dispute that “A History of Violence” should be on this list. Try it! The Korean and the Japanese films are recommended!
Clan of the Cave Bear. Stargate SG-1, organism causes folks to becomes Neanderthal-type thingies. Hilariously stupid. Oh, wait, not evolution.
Along with “Them,” there was a number of other 1950’s “fear of the bomb” pictures featuring giant mutants, including “Beginning of the End” featuring Peter Graves and grasshoppers.
Star Trek: Voyager episode “Distant Origin”, in which we see an intelligent species of dinosaur from Earth. Most notably, a holodeck seqence in which the computer “projects evolution forward” to show what they might look like.
It won’t be out for 2+ more years, but Guillermo de Toro is making a movie of H. P. Lovecraft’s “At the Mountains of Madness”. Speaking of Lovecraft: “Re-Animator”
Some actual good ones: Adaptation, starring Nicolas Cage (even better if you read The Orchid Thief first, on which it is “based”) Master and Commander
Interesting! Would love to see what you end up with…will you upload a slideshare or write up a post on it?
Does genetic engineering count? If so, then Gattaca. Old school TV: Land of the Lost, Flintstones? (Showing my age here.)
In case you don’t have it yet: the Alien series, and the Species series. (So, basically anything HJ Giger had his fingers in.)
Yes, although that mentions evolution (it’s what Hitchcock would have called the McGuffin) rather than employs it or represents it in the plot (I’m looking at how it is portrayed in pop culture). I’ll have to have another look at what sort of evolution (i.e., Lamarckian?) it is pushing. However, I can’t believe I missed some of these suggestions…
Evolution of machine life: The Matrix trilogy Artificial Intelligence (humans are gone at the end) …and possibly I Robot (evolution of a sentient machine).
Day of the Triffids? Village of the Damned? Hey, are there any other John Wyndham adaptations? I see there are TV versions of several, including Consider Her Ways, which you might consider as touching on evolution.
Star Trek Next Generation had an episode where the crew started de-volving. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genesis_(Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation) A horrible portrayal, but one that tends to pop up in pop culture a lot.
And on a similar note, there’s “Threshold” from Star Trek: Voyager: http://agonybooth.com/recaps/Star_Trek/Voyager/Threshold.aspx?Page=6
Evolution is also, I think, strongly implied in any movie which features space aliens, such as Independence Day, the Star Wars series (yeah they look like muppets, and there are other overriding themes), the Aliens series, and many Star Trek movies and episodes. Comic book heros, such as superman, might be an exception, I don’t know.
The Andromeda Strain (IIRC it’s a major plot point) @Kristian: “History of Violence” – Oh, Good call that man.
Monster on the Campus (1958). Check it out. Exposure to coelacanth blood causes any creature to de-evolve into its ancestral state.
I’ve seen many of those movies and as a blanket statement they completely misprepresent evolution as ‘individuals changing in response to X’. (Fantastic Four, Evolution??, POKEMON???) . Abso-F*ing-lutely worng! I am not surprised that so many people reject ‘evolution’ as a result. The problem with movies on evolution is that evolution is soooo slow and unpredictable. Not suitable for a plot device in a 90-minute entertainment session.
The point of the lecture will be that evolution is not a narrative on a human scale, and so we cannot easily represent it in fiction.
Ah, I was wondering what the lecture was about. Of course, a culture doesn’t have to assimilated evolutionary thought to have stories about the ancient days when things were different. Some of these films seem like that; that is to say, evolution is treated as a case of ‘long ago and far away.’
This is absolutely correct, of course. But, damn it, I would expect proper science fiction to pick up that gauntlet and run with it. Having said that, I guess what this just shows is that one should not expect real sci-fi on television on in movies. I expect that if I thought about it for a few minutes, I’d be able to come up with good examples of proper portrayal of evolution in sci-fi books.
In that case, 2001 came closest to at least suggesting the timescales involved. And what about The Sound Of Thunder (2005 movie of Ray Bradbury short story)? I know, strictly speaking, it’s about the butterfly effect but it’s based on the premiss of history, including biological history, being a linked series of incremental changes and it makes Gould’s point about rewinding the tape and not getting the same result a second time.
Come to think of it, there’s Miyazaki’s Ponyo, which has creatures from the Devonian swimming around in 20th century waters and centers on a fish who morphs into a human. And his Nausicaä in the Valley of the Wind, where a very strange ecosystem has evolved in the wake of a long-ago human-caused cataclysm.
Well, if anime is under discussion, then I offer up the somewhat obscure (both in availability and content) Serial Experiments Lain and Texhnolyze. IIRC, their author, Yoshitoshi ABe, seems to have his own questionable ideas about evolution, especially about human evolution stagnating and humans using technology to overcome that stagnation.
Anime and manga are too broad for my mostly 30-plus audience… Besides, evolution plays a core role in nearly every one. I’d need months just to cover Neon Genesis.
” The Land that Time Forgot”? Schlock but quite enjoyable. Did they ever film Aldous Huxley’s “After Many a Summer”? Evolution was an important theme there, treated sardonically. ………….Answering my own question, Google tells me that a UK TV film was made in 1967.
It’s only a segment of a film, but how about the animated evolution segment set to Ravel’s Bolero in ‘Allegro non Troppo’? Granted the film is just an excuse to put a bunch of animated shorts together.
Worth mention that Allegro Non Troppo is sort of a parody of Fantasia, with the Bolero number cynically mirroring Fantasia’s Rite of Spring.
I love this, but it is about the creationist antievolutionary struggle (that is, struggle against reality) rather than portraying evolution (although Ross is shown as a prat, which he was).
Join the club and belated Happy Birthday. You know, when you adopted the silverback avatar I had this image of you pottering around in a garden with David Attenborough hiding in the bushes doing a breathless piece to camera about the need to adopt a very deferential posture in the presence of such a powerful intellect.
Oh and Island of Lost Souls or if you are a heretic you can go with one of the remakes aka The Island of Dr. Moreau.
The Fly by David Cronenberg. The main character is a scientist who transforms into a fly. I am not sure if it is in this movie but there is a guy who gets an extra eye at the back of the head just because it is useful.
Fantasia. Also, I seem to remember that there was a website that gave scores to movies based on how “unchristian” they were (and no, I can’t remember the name of it). I’m sure they would have objected to anything even getting close to looking like evolution.
Thanks for the link. The thing about that Fantasia episode is that Disney could (more or less) depict evolution at something like the proper scale because he wasn’t telling an ordinary narrative. He was doing something else. That particular episode was all about scale, from macro to micro.
In the film ‘Screamers’, scientists have created a self-replicating machine that continues to improve in successive generations, up to the point where the machines can no longer be distinguished from people.