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Anyone watch Darwin's Darkest Hour?
- Thread starter Travis
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Corsair 115
Penultimate Amazing
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I watched it. I enjoyed it, though it seemed to wrap up rather quickly and the flashback style used was a bit clunky sometimes.
The program was filmed in Nova Scotia, which might explain why I thought I recognized one Canadian actor in it and why the accents didn't sound particularly British in some cases.
That doesn' mean anything in and of itself. Anthony Hopkins doesn't much look like Richard Nixon, for example. It's his portrayal of Nixon that counts. So in that regard is the quality of the acting that matters most rather than the similarity in appearance.
The program was filmed in Nova Scotia, which might explain why I thought I recognized one Canadian actor in it and why the accents didn't sound particularly British in some cases.
That doesn' mean anything in and of itself. Anthony Hopkins doesn't much look like Richard Nixon, for example. It's his portrayal of Nixon that counts. So in that regard is the quality of the acting that matters most rather than the similarity in appearance.
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I watched it last night. I hate to say it, but I was not impressed with it. It did not feel like good entertainment. It also did not do much to explain the development of or theory of evolution itself, and did not feel very educational.
It seemed like the show wanted to be a melodrama about Darwin’s inner life, but I won’t say anything else for fear of spoiling the story just in case.
It seemed like the show wanted to be a melodrama about Darwin’s inner life, but I won’t say anything else for fear of spoiling the story just in case.
No, but I did go to see "Creation" at the weekend, in Edinburgh.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0974014/
I expect the movie covers much of the same ground.
I enjoyed it. As far as I could see it was pretty faithful to the story as I have read it.
It was dramatised - Darwin's conversations with his dead daughter were portrayed as genuine hallucinatory events, the implication being this was either due to fever from his chronic (and much speculated upon) illness, or to guilt at being unable to save her life. Of course it's hard to say if we are supposed to take the se scenes literally or as dramatic metaphor.
Paul Bettany as CRD certainly did resemble photos of the middle aged man.
One complaint was of the excessive use of flashbacks. The story was presented in an atemporal sequence of scenes nearly as confusing as "Pulp Fiction". Only by Darwin's receding hairline could we tell what was past and what "present".
It did make me wonder about something. Darwin bred pigeons. He knew about the result of inbreeding. He and Emma Wedgewood were first cousins.
It has always seemed incredibly improbable , given Darwin's extensive reading, that he failed to stumble across the work of Mendel.
Is it cheap psychology to wonder if he knew of it, but subconsciously suppressed that awareness and actually avoided reading Mendel because it might have confirmed his worst fears?
This is what good drama does to you. You start wondering "what if..."?
I reccommend the film to anyone interested in such matters.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0974014/
I expect the movie covers much of the same ground.
I enjoyed it. As far as I could see it was pretty faithful to the story as I have read it.
It was dramatised - Darwin's conversations with his dead daughter were portrayed as genuine hallucinatory events, the implication being this was either due to fever from his chronic (and much speculated upon) illness, or to guilt at being unable to save her life. Of course it's hard to say if we are supposed to take the se scenes literally or as dramatic metaphor.
Paul Bettany as CRD certainly did resemble photos of the middle aged man.
One complaint was of the excessive use of flashbacks. The story was presented in an atemporal sequence of scenes nearly as confusing as "Pulp Fiction". Only by Darwin's receding hairline could we tell what was past and what "present".
It did make me wonder about something. Darwin bred pigeons. He knew about the result of inbreeding. He and Emma Wedgewood were first cousins.
It has always seemed incredibly improbable , given Darwin's extensive reading, that he failed to stumble across the work of Mendel.
Is it cheap psychology to wonder if he knew of it, but subconsciously suppressed that awareness and actually avoided reading Mendel because it might have confirmed his worst fears?
This is what good drama does to you. You start wondering "what if..."?
I reccommend the film to anyone interested in such matters.
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Foster Zygote
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Actually his genetic relationship with his wife did pose some concern for him. As far as Gregor Mendel: his work was published in a journal so obscure that it was virtually unknown to anyone. It's likely that, had someone not stumbled upon it after the publication of Origin of Species and realized its significance, we would never have heard of it.
Foster Zygote
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The director stated that his intent was to show Charles Darwin the human being. So many people who feel threatened by his discovery have attempted to portray him as a monster that he wanted to show him as the person we know him to be from his writings and the writings of others: a devoted husband and father and a man who felt honor bound to do the honest thing, even when he thought it might compromise his claim to his discovery.
Foster I remember reading (I think in one of Stephen Gould's essays), that Darwin had in his library - and is known to have read - articles which referred to Mendel's publication.
On reflection it's hard to believe he would have deliberately avoided reading it, but the film did make me wonder. Certainly, it's not a thought that ever occurred to me before. I tend to think of CRD as honest, methodical and logical, but was he always subconsciously honest with himself? He was a man with kids and a wife he loved dearly. A dramatised film like "Creation" can highlight the fact that this was no Vulcan , but an emotional human with all the psychological weaknesses that implies.
I realise Proc. Nat. Hist. Soc. Brunn wasn't the most widely read of journals, but Darwin did read some very obscure stuff, and it's not as though he lacked for correspondents.
Mendel didn't publish till 7 years after the first edition of "The Origin", but especially after Jenkin's "blending inheritance" criticism, not only CRD himself, but also every pro-Darwinian biologist in the world must have been on the lookout for anything that suggested a particulate inheritance mechanism. Darwin's network of correspondents was global. Someone must have read Mendel. Yet not one person mentioned him? Or did Darwin fail to follow it up?
On reflection it's hard to believe he would have deliberately avoided reading it, but the film did make me wonder. Certainly, it's not a thought that ever occurred to me before. I tend to think of CRD as honest, methodical and logical, but was he always subconsciously honest with himself? He was a man with kids and a wife he loved dearly. A dramatised film like "Creation" can highlight the fact that this was no Vulcan , but an emotional human with all the psychological weaknesses that implies.
I realise Proc. Nat. Hist. Soc. Brunn wasn't the most widely read of journals, but Darwin did read some very obscure stuff, and it's not as though he lacked for correspondents.
Mendel didn't publish till 7 years after the first edition of "The Origin", but especially after Jenkin's "blending inheritance" criticism, not only CRD himself, but also every pro-Darwinian biologist in the world must have been on the lookout for anything that suggested a particulate inheritance mechanism. Darwin's network of correspondents was global. Someone must have read Mendel. Yet not one person mentioned him? Or did Darwin fail to follow it up?
I'm looking forward to seeing it, but as of the moment, it has no U.S. distributor... Grrrr... because...? Why?
I read somewhere that companies were too afraid of the creationists' potential backlash, but I find that hard to believe.
RecoveringYuppy
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You're referring to inbreeding? Mendel's work didn't contribute much new knowledge to that. His rules allow the calculation of your odds of inheriting idential alleles from close relatives but no awareness of what the risk of that might be. Most traits called "recessive" require inheriting two fo the same allele but are not necessarily unhealthy.