We’ve all seen movies use loose conceptions of science to further a plot along, whether it’s time-travel, radiation, or being able to clone dinosaurs and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Evolution has also been used in the movies, sometimes with a benign portrayal like in 2001: A Space Odyssey or Disney’s Fantasia. Other times the movies portray something that would make Darwin murder finches. These movies fall in the latter category and help explain why only about 10% of high school students understand the idea of a common ancestor and why the general public doesn’t do much better. Here are the top five movies and the evolution myths they present.
5) Waterworld (1995)
The Movie
What list of movie mess-ups would be complete without mentioning Kevin Costner’s 1995 aquatic adventure? In the film, which is speculated to take place around 2500, the polar ice caps have melted in an age known as Gore’s wet dream, leaving the Earth almost entirely covered by water. Kevin Costner, needing to adapt to the changing environment, is a mutant, possessing gills that allow him to breathe underwater and webbed feet that allow him to run faster or something. His mutation is simply an evolutionary adaptation brought about by the changing environment on Earth. In the movie the mutation may not be as beneficial as it seems as people try to kill him because of it.
The Myths
The concept of adaptability in evolution is one of the most misunderstood things about the theory and it’s one that we see over and over again in the movies. Organisms do not adapt based on need, rather traits in a population are favored through natural selection. In other words Kevin Costner wouldn’t have gills because they mutated out of some necessity, the gills would have had to randomly mutate first. That means there’s an equal chance that Costner’s character could have mutated wings or any other less-favorable “adaptation” to Waterworld. Giving Costner his mutation this way would be like explaining the chick with three tits in Total Recall as an evolutionary adaptation to Martian whore houses.
4) Planet of the Apes (2001)
The Movie
The original Planet of the Apes from 1968 is considered a classic with it and its sequels getting remakes. The movies’ central message focuses on the closeness between humans and apes. They say that apes are smart and therefore people should stop mistreating them. The movies place humans in the minds and stinking paws of the apes.
While the series often invokes evolution as an explanation, for instance when Charlton Heston’s character asks, “How did this come to be? A world where apes evolved from men?” only the two remakes rely on evolution as a plot device. Wait, you ask, but aren’t the original ones set in the far future of Earth where apes did evolve from man? Yes, but while set in the future, the plot relies on a time travel paradox where the apes from the first film manage to time travel back to 1970’s Earth and their descendants eventually rise against the humans. While the two remakes use evolution, the more recent Rise of the Planet of the Apes at least gives a plausible evolutionary explanation, invoking gene therapy to create more intelligent apes, even though it’s still a massive stretch.
The Myths
First, Heston’s quote about a world where apes evolved from men is already an incorrect understanding. Men did not evolve from apes; apes and man share a common ancestor. The Planet of the Apes movies stretch the notion of man evolving from apes to create an evolutionary hierarchy and in the original movies the hierarchy is reversed. Unfortunately evolution does not work on hierarchies. Apes came to be through selective pressures, the same way humans did, over time diverging from the common ancestor and creating the modern species we know today. Humans are not more evolved than apes, yet just came to be under different circumstances.
In Tim Burton’s 2001 remake, he attempted to destroy all that was sacred in the original movies and therefore had to use evolution as part of the plot. The new narrative relies on the ape planet being originally populated by space chimps that crashed on the planet thousands of years earlier.
Evolution in action
The problem is that these space chimps have not been bred for intelligence, they’re just regular chimps that have been trained to do simple piloting exercises. The movie later explains that when the space station crashed on the planet the apes “turned out to be stronger and smarter than [they] thought.” The apes band together and eventually take over. After thousands of years the apes somehow rapidly evolve into bi-pedal and speaking beings because, hey, space chimps are smarter. Except that the chimp’s offspring won’t inherit the chimp’s training, all subsequent generations would simply be regular non-space chimps. It’s a Lamarckian interpretation of evolution through acquired traits, the theory Darwin overturned with his own. And if the apes evolved that much over thousands of years, why were all the humans exactly the same?
Chimp Heston defends the right to bear feces
3) X-Men First Class (2011)
The Movie
The first X-men movie pitched the mutants as the next stage of human evolution. X-men first class uped the ante substantially with an origin story and an even heavier focus on evolution. Professor X specifically is shown as a professor on evolution and genetic mutations. He explains their mutations as the next stage in human evolution and calls the mutants a new species akin to humans replacing Neanderthals. The mutant Darwin takes on the motto “adapt to survive,” referencing Darwin’s theory. The theme of evolution is laced throughout the film, culminating in the closing credits where “X” is used to visual represent chromosomes, the helical structure of DNA, and of course, the X-men.
The Myths
After this movie came out, riddled with errors in evolutionary theory, the good people at Scientific American even felt that they had to respond. Among their complaints is the character of Darwin being especially misleading. Darwin’s mutation allows him to adapt to any situation he finds himself in, like forming gills to breathe underwater, changing his eyes to see in the dark, and becoming a white man when he visits the south.
But “adapt to survive” isn’t Darwin at all, it’s in fact Darwin’s predecessor, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck who argued for individual adaptation and the inheritability of acquired traits. Giraffes don’t have long necks from constantly stretching them, they have them because those with shorter necks were less likely to survive and have offspring.
The film also misuses mutations. As any evolutionary biologist or parent of a child with Down’s Syndrome will tell you, mutations are almost always harmful to the organism. However, given billions of years and an unfathomable number of mutations, the vast array of species we know today have been born. Mutations cannot cause new species to appear, rather the appearance of the mutation and its transference to future generations will create a new species over time. In the X-men movies, all the mutants presumably have different mutations, therefore by Professor X’s own definition of X-men as a new species, each individual mutant should comprise its own species.
Guys, I just read Darwin’s mind. He’s pissed.
2) Super Mario Brothers (1993)
The Movie
This poor poor movie. It’s tried to be erased from the memory of many, including all those associated with the Mario franchise. I’m convinced that part of Nintendo’s secret mission statement is to hunt down and destroy all evidence this movie ever existed. Nonetheless, the movie does have its charms, and it was a pretty daunting task to create a plot from the source material. Central to such a plot is evolution. In Super Mario Bros, Brooklyn has an alternate universe created when a meteor smashed into Earth and got rid of the dinosaurs by sending them to this other universe (just go with it). Anyway, in this other universe, dinosaurs evolved into people instead of monkeys. King Koopa played by Dennis Hopper, who at this point has some bad evolution-karma, plans to merge the universes and take over Brooklyn by using de-evolution guns. King Koopa explains evolution during a scene.
Koopa: You may think of evolution as an upward process, things evolve from primeval slime up to single-celled organisms, up to intelligent life. De-evolution, of course, works the opposite way, back to simpler forms.
Mario: What single-celled organism did you evolve from?
Koopa: Tyrannosaurus Rex.
Unfortunately I don’t think that was a scripted joke. In the same scene Koopa orders Toad to be de-evolved. He’s strapped in a chair and put in a machine that turns him into a Goomba.
Later Koopa uses the same machine to try to make his two henchmen smarter by evolving them, this time with the machine re-colored to really make sure the viewer understands what’s happening.
The Myths
There’s one very big myth in the movie – that evolution is purposeful. Almost all the other movies also attribute purpose to evolution as well. Biologists call this a teleological explanation when things evolve based on need or a higher purpose, the exact opposite of Darwin’s theory. For instance, seeing evolution as simply making things more complex or intelligent. Often a more complex or specialized species will not survive with a rapidly changing environment, that’s evolution killing off that species. In Super Mario, humans are the purpose of evolution and if primates didn’t evolve into them, then dinosaurs would have, it’s simply an increase in intelligence driving evolution.
The de-evolve thing is another issue altogether but I’ll try to avoid nit-picking something that is obviously just being used as a silly plot device. First, there’s no such thing as de-evolution in biology. While almost impossible, if a species became one of its ancestors over time, then it wouldn’t have de-evolved, it would have evolved into it. Evolution has no direction other than time, as time flows, so does evolution. Second, evolution does not happen through an organism, but through a population, an organism lacks the potential to evolve, or de-evolve.
Also, they use a de-evolve gun to turn a human into a monkey and as mentioned earlier, that’s just nonsense as humans did not evolve from monkeys, it would be like using it to turn a whale into a hippo.
1) Evolution (2001)
The Movie
This movie, because it built itself up around the whole concept of evolution, may be the most damaging. An alien life form comes to earth and has more-complex dna which allows it to evolve faster. The organism starts as single-celled then proceeds to go through the same progression of life we see on earth but with all the animals looking like they’re on steroids. There’s fungus, a pre-Cambrian explosion of arthropods, and then some dinosaurs and eventually blue gorillas. David Duchovny, playing a guy researching aliens, explains everything the viewer needs to know about evolution: “It’s like they’re evolving…they’re growing into more complex organisms, it’s evolution.”
Best Creationist theme park ride
The Myths
This movie was made to troll biologists. It’s like renaming Looney Tunes as “Physics.” Like the others, it wrongly describes evolution as life growing into more complex organisms, complexity is simply a by-product of time and chance. It also supposes that evolution follows the same pattern as on earth with a progression from arthropods to reptiles to mammals. So what about the whole dinosaurs destroyed by a meteor that allowed mammals to rise thing that King Koopa kept harping about? In this movie even that doesn’t matter, you end up with apes either way.
Alien chimps dislike Xanax
Like Super Marion, this movie portrays evolution as on some sort of trajectory from simple to more advanced life forms. Life gets more complex over time not because it’s getting more advanced, but because that’s the only way to go. But getting more advanced does not mean becoming more like humans. In other words, humans are not the end result of evolution, that would be like saying that every other modern-day species is also the end result of evolution. And why not, all the genes around today came from the same source, a common ancestor.
Rant in Closing
Now, I realize that these are just stupid movies and I could be accused of nitpicking. Some people might even say that using evolution as a plot device in movies is good to spark the interest of kids. “Evolution can give you superpowers?! That’s so beibish” (I don’t know what kids say these days). And yes, it may indeed pique the interest of kids to learn about evolution, but you know what else it does? It completely removes all interest as soon as they find out that no, people can’t evolve superpowers. The same thing happens with dinosaurs. Every sane kid loves dinosaurs and most would love to work on dinosaurs but as soon as they realize that being a paleontologist doesn’t involve dreaming up dinosaur fight scenarios, the interest leaves and eventually they end up on Fox News complaining about their tax dollars being spent to dig in the dirt.
Hopefully one day, people will watch these movies and laugh at how inaccurate evolutionary theory was presented, the same way people today laugh at old movies with radiation as a plot device. Unfortunately the public is rather unreceptive to Darwinian evolution despite it being overwhelmingly accepted in the scientific community since 1870. Often people misunderstand evolution because of misinformation, either through Creationists, or the media, yet understanding the theory of evolution may also require overcoming psychological roadblocks. People naturally seek teleological explanations to describe change in species and often use creationist reasoning to describe man’s origins.
While your explanation of how all of these movies got evolution wrong, most of them in spectacular ways, is accurate, the idea that these movies could lead to further misunderstandings about evolution is, as best, a stretch.
ANYONE who watches “Evolution” (a terrifically funny movie, IMHO!) and develops what they believe to be an understanding of evolution, based on explanations in the movies, never had a snowball’s chance in hell of ACTUALLY understanding evolution in the first place!!
BTW, while they’re not film, and, therefore, don’t exactly fall into the category of your column, I feel that it’s worth mentioning the “Wild Cards” book series!
The “Wild Cards” are a series of books following the lives of dozens and dozens of different characters, each one written by a different sci-fi author, and edited by George R. R. Martin of “Game of Thrones” fame.
The series has to do with a biological agent from an alien race that is released over Manhattan (and which eventually affects most of the planet.) The biological agent causes immediate mutations in any human that comes in contact with it.
The reason I bring this series up is because, unlike in almost all of the movies you mention above, this virus (I don’t remember if it’s a virus or not, but I’ll just call it that.) acts in a way that’s much more in line with the way evolution works!
While the “Wild Cards” mutations affect each person randomly, they fall into three basic categories: Black Queens, Jokers, and Aces. (Yes, the “cards” metaphor is used throughout the books!)
Those who “draw the Black Queen” represent the vast majority of those affected. They die almost immediately!
A very small percentage become Jokers, those with mutations that, while not generally life-threatening, are almost completely negative, turning them into monsters and freaks.
Finally, a MINUTE percentage of those affected become Aces, with mutations akin to the X-Men. They are basically superheroes!
What I always liked about the series is that the mutations are like the evolution of an entire species, on a greatly accelerated pace, and with the virus taking the place of selective pressures and all the other factors that decide whether a mutation will be advantageous and viable. Further, they avoid the use of “need based” evolution.
Of course, it IS a science FICTION series, but as those go, this one at least most of the inaccuracies and nonsense you point out in your article!
Sorry, that last line should be:
“this one at least –> AVOIDS <– most of the inaccuracies and nonsense you point out in your article!"
Thanks for those points. I just saw that Wild Cards is supposedly picked up to become a movie so maybe I’ll have to add it to the list after all.
Cheers.
REALLY?!? That’s either great or horrible to those of us who are fans! It depends on so many things, although, honestly, I can’t see how they could be too faithful to the books and at the same time avoid an NC-17 or X rating!!! They are UNBELIEVABLY explicitly violent and sexual, often at the same time! Even knowing that in advance, it still quite shocking at times.
Regardless, the individual stories are amazing, as is the greater story that connects them all!
[…] taken on the task of calling out bad evolutionary biology in specific films (e.g., here, here, and here), but I’ll give you an example that I find particularly disturbing. In the recently released Man […]
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The assertion that “Mutation is random” is a fallacy. In Evolution there are “fits and starts” that “have to be based on necessity” for a particular species that splits off from its forebears. A dramatic degree of “adaptation” can occur within only a few generations. How else could you explain how 2 birds of the same species developed a radically different tolerance to cold at the South Pole. One of them, the ancestor of today’s “penguins” and its descendants can tolerate -140 F (-96C) temperatures, while the other bird concurrently evolved into a different species of avian that had to live farther north of the South Pole in order to survive, and pass its genes along.
Mutation is effectively random. It essentially occurs due to molecular events in the DNA and involves millions of microscopic events on a scale of thousands of years. Therefore it can treated effectively as random and is much more appropriate for conceptualizing evolution. This is in the same way a gas molecule in a container has a “random” position. Nothing is really “random” but if you look into quantum mechanics or Brownian motion you see modelling some things as random is a big part of most modern theories.
First of all, evolution is just a theory. It seems accurate, but its far from a fact. Second evolution DOES provide useful changes. Well, mutation provides the changes( useful or not), but evolution weeds them out. I think that is actually exactly what most of those movies were saying in the first place. Darwins superpower is what it is. People simply call him Darwin( not because of darwin’s theory, but as a quick and understandable nickname) I think you didn’t watch the films carefully enough.
We now know that evolution has a lot more in common with epigenetics then the outdated belief in purely random mutations. Climb on board- because this purely random notion of evolution is wrong and it adherents ‘needs to evolve.’ Science marches on.