In celebration of Darwin in Malibu, which I'm directing at the Generic Theater in March, I am finally reading The Origin of Species and posting chapter-by-chapter summaries and commentary. Part 0 covers the history of the book, plus its title page and introduction.

Part Zero: The Origin of the Origin of Species

Charles Darwin was a naturalist. He was on track to become a doctor, but he proved a rather squeamish medical student, and left medical school for Cambridge to become instead an Anglican priest. His father, a doctor, was disappointed enough by this to say, "You care for nothing but shooting, dogs and rat-catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family." While at Cambridge, he found his true calling: that of a naturalist, an all-around scientist of the natural world (and especially the creatures which inhabited it). "Naturalists" were the progenitors of modern biologists, and like so many very early men of science, the best of them  became masters of many disciplines. Naturalists combined aspects of what we know today as biology, botany, entomology, taxonomy, chemistry, geology, and more.

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A couple of months ago, I started writing a long post about the movie Expelled. I made the mistake of assuming there were but a handful of sane voices in the meeting-place of public opinion, and that I needed to join them to be heard above the crowd cheering on this insidiously dishonest movie. But when I showed up at the meeting, the crowd was jeering and the filmmakers had already been laughed out of the room. My humble services were not needed–much to the relief, I'm sure, of those who would have received them.

So I just slapped together this list of links so you can enjoy the saga if you like. For those who are curious about the Expelled kerfuffle (a polite term deriving from the Latin word "clusterfuck"), I include the following one-paragraph synopsis:

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My Sundance screenplay, All of Creation, featured among its themes the importance of science to understanding our world and finding meaning in it. In fact, the slot I took at the Sundance lab (talked about in this post) was created by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, which advances science and science understanding in the popular media. I've always loved science, but only recently realized that it is under systematic attack by religious fundamentalists posing as scientific thinkers. I still remember watching Inherit the Wind as a kid in the late 1980's, thinking what a great movie it was and how lucky the world was to have outgrown such astounding stupidity as Creationism. It's still one of my favorite films–and favorite plays–but it's since come to my attention that the rabble-rousing inanity has resurged under the laughable sheen of Intelligent Design, or ID for short.

These IDiots, like the obscenely rich coiffed televangelists of our nation, leverage the great wealth they've accumulated from hoodwinked believers and spend it on very professional public-relations efforts to garner public sympathy for opinions which get laughed out of courtrooms and scientific journals because they are so effortlessly demonstrably false.

I've had some success with my screenplay about science, and have begun writing another and have already applied for one grant on its behalf (as documented in this post), so I think I have a certain responsibility to counter this tent-revival of infectious ignorance. I'm going to write about the new farce of a film, Expelled, and to do so I wanted to do a little groundwork to provide one small example of the kind of IDiocy I'll be referring to therein. So here goes my first crack at the debate, in the form of a rebuttal to an excerpt of a piece of ID propaganda:

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