Chapter 1: Variation Under Domestication

Chapter 1 opens with general overview of how animals differ from one another under domestication and yet in many cases come from one source species. He claims this as a promising place to look for explanations of how so many species came to be.

It's interesting what a paltry sample he has to draw from in conducting his analysis; scientists today have a crushing wealth of taxonomies, specimens, numbers, research going back dozens of generations about species Darwin never knew existed. So he is wrong in some of his assumptions about domesticated animals (for example, he guesses that dogs are so varied as to likely come from more than one ancestor), and about the sources of some of the variation (like drooping ears in some domesticated animals arising simply from disuse of the ear muscles).

I do not believe, as we shall presently see, that all our dogs have descended from any one wild species….

That's right: there are many things Darwin was wrong about. (Creationists love to chuckle and point at these places, as if they're the ones who discovered his errors through their own research and the arrogant scientists don't know about it yet.) This is what's so great about science: when science is wrong about something, it gets disproven and is no longer believed to be true.

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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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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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