Creation: A new movie on Darwin

Now we have a movie about Darwin called, The Creation. Over at The Panda's Thumb (a blog named loosely after an essay, "The Panda's Peculiar Thumb," by Stephen Jay Gould) they've posted a review (click HERE) by Eugenie Scott of the National Center for Science Education. I'm really looking forward to seeing the movie which is being shown at the Toronto Film Festival.

Scott writes:

I and NCSE staff were invited to view the new Jon Amiel movie, Creation, starring Paul Bettany and Jennifer Connolly. I believe it to be a thoughtful, well-made film that will change many views of Darwin held by the public—for the good. The acting is strong, the visuals are wonderful, and it treats with loving care the Victorian details of the furnishings at Down house and other sites (such as Malvern), and the local church.

The movie takes place after Darwin has returned from the Beagle voyage, and has settled down with his wife, Emma. It concentrates on their relationship, on the growth of their family, and of course, on the production of his most famous scientific work, On the Origin of Species. It looks hard at Darwin’s growing disenchantment with Christianity, especially the concept of Providence, and how poorly it fits Darwin the naturalist’s knowledge of a very unpeaceable kingdom. Darwin’s frequent illness is portrayed with brutal honesty. Sometimes pale, nauseated, unable even to eat dinner with his family, much less work on his science, Darwin is shown suffering from vague symptoms which he attempts to cure with what we would recognize as quack treatments.

A centerpiece of the movie is the death of Annie, the Darwins’ beloved 10 year old daughter, and how it affected the relationship of Charles and Emma. Much of the movie takes place as flashbacks to when Annie was alive; much takes place after her death, when her father imagines conversations with her. In some reviews the later Annie is described as a ghost. Not really. Creation is not a ghost story. Rather, the filmmakers are taking dramatic license to make Darwin’s thoughts about her visible to us. Also given much attention is Darwin’s reluctance to set down his scientific ideas on evolution and natural selection for fear of upsetting the devout Emma, and society in general. Huxley and Hooker encourage him to publish, but Darwin procrastinates.

This is the 200th b-day year for Charles Darwin and the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species, or, as my father-in-law calls it "the good book." So the flood of Darwiniana has been incredible. Festivals and happiness. Hell, I got an email today that asked e to help book a hip-hop artist who does stuff on evolution. I'm game.

I think that we should note that Darwin wrote a lot of other books. The second most famous is The Voyage of the Beagle wherein his travels and collections take life and we can see his genius as a naturalist integrating his ideas. He wrote The Descent of Man wherein he agreed with Smith and Hume that our sympathies as social beings lead us to do good. In part, our evolution as social beings has created our concept of good. This has of course affronted many a religous person because it suggests that impersonal natural sources have "given" us our morality/ies and that God has not. There is no one law but a window that indicates what is good for survival.

Morality is an indicator of survival. In today's day and age, that's hard to swallow for the totalitarian.

But there has been the backlash. While it is most heartening to see is that there is a concerted effort in the broader scientific, artistic, philosophical, and humanities fields to really work toward effective understanding of what evolution actually is and why Darwin was instrumental though far from the end of the story, the religious right is out there in force to quash it.

There have been those forces in the "armies of the night" who have fought to caricature our respect for Darwin as a cult of personality but I think that it is largely a failure. Unlike the cult of Stalin or Mao or the religion of Christianity, the movement that surrounds evolution comes from the power of the idea to describe, explain, and predict the real material universe and not to deify the man who did it. Unlike Stalin who believed that the spirit of history would move us to a socialist state, Darwin was under no such compulsion. Evolution is as yet to be disproved while Stalinism is an abject human failure that has created tremendous suffering. In fact, evolution is practically mathematically proven while the systems that have followed Stalin, who rejected the Darwinian account for Lysenkoism, failed. Awfully. But our reverence for a powerful theory is, I think, easily misconstrued by creationists and those who don't take the time to learn about evolution as a theory and a fact. Experiencing awe because an idea hitches integrates other ideas and facts is part of being a human. It just so happens that evolution is perhaps the greatest idea human have ever created. It integrates more than anything else in descriptive, explanatory, predictive, and meaningful ways. Sorry creationists. You lose.

Darwin did not come up with evolution willy-nilly. The materialist philosophers of Rome had some inklings about the recombination of matter and energy. If one reads Lucretius's De Rarum Natura (On the Nature of Things) you will have a sense of what I mean. Much much later, David Hume had very similar conclusions to what Darwin would actually explain and describe. Erasmus Darwin had similar though incomplete ideas. Then came Charles whose life we can read as being about evolution. And for those of us who revere and use evolution for what it is, we thank him and might think of him narrowly. But that is not the whole story.

He was a human with the quibbles we have. He lost his daughter Annie. He loved. He wondered how his work affected his family. His health was quite awful. People around him who loved his idea pressured him to do more. There were those who villified him. I think, he was like most of us but vaulted onto a huge stage because his genius was nearly incomparable because of his ability to integrate information.

What I hope can happen in the wake of this film is a humanization of the man who galvanized evolutionary theory and our understanding of biology. I'll follow Scott on this one and try to do the following:

By telling an interesting story, and making Darwin human, Creation will I think encourage some viewers to find out more about the historical Darwin and his ideas. From my standpoint as director of NCSE, that’s useful, indeed. The more people know about evolution and its most famous proponent, the less they will fear it. I’d like to see this movie get distributed in the US. Unfortunately, although Canadians and British will see it, there is not yet a US distributor. We can only speculate why, but the well-known American nervousness about evolution is probably and unfortunately part of the mix.

This movie deserves to be seen in movies, not relegated merely to Netflix on DVD. I hope the reviews following the North American premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 10 are good, and also the reviews following the British premiere October 25. If a bomb like Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed can get a distributor, a well-made movie with an excellent script, actors, direction, and cinematography like Creation surely should.

Maybe people who care about science should do what the promoters of Expelled did: get lots of people to show up on opening weekend to give the movie a big ratings boost.

Of course, it has to get a distributor first, and there isn’t a lot we can do about that. If anyone has contacts with someone associated with movie distribution, send them to Creation!

I am about to call my local indie theater.