Daleks and Reavers and Bears
May. 1st, 2005 07:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hazelkFeeling virtuous. Abstracts written, essays marked, meetings organized. Read a nice little piece in the Saturday Guardian about Jonathan Coe’s obsession with The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes with a (possibly) happy ending.
This weeks Dr. Who was the deal breaker for my other half. He’s not going to watch it any more and it must have been bad because complaining about it even elicited a back-handed compliment to BtVS. It did manage to make the eponymous Dalek seem scary but that doesn’t count because it’s not a criteria you’d apply to a brand new series. No, the storylines are crap and the science is terrible. Last straw for his suspension of disbelief was the contaminated Dalek ‘mutating’ towards a higher moral purpose. Lamarkist claptrap. Mutation is random, the successful ones get selected and that’s all there is and need ever be. We'll accept vampires with no breath, noises in space and Scully identifying human DNA from two bands on a Southern blot but will never, never tolerate assertions that contradict evolutionary theory.
Nature has an article on the rise of ‘intelligent-design’ on US college campuses:
The arguments are familiar: some biological systems are too complex, periodic explosions in the fossil record too large and differences between species too great to be explained by natural selection alone.
After reading it I’m still not at all clear how this is a subject that can be taught separately. If we’re not teaching students to think critically about scientific results and their current explanations as a matter of course, we really are failing them. And the implication that intelligent-design means accepting that some phenomena cannot be explained and that therefore we should stop asking questions about them is anti-science at a far more fundamental level than any creationist claims that the Earth is only a few thousand years old.
I get the feeling I’m missing something. Evolution does seem to be important to scientists beyond those active in field – in an Guardian article a few weeks back the usual suspects were interviewed about what scientific ideas they thought it was most important to get across in schools. Natural selection was the single most popular choice. Darwinism is philosophically disorientating. I still remember the moment of understanding it for the first time and simultaneously losing my religion. Almost on aesthetic grounds. I’m going to hell for the pretty.
Back to the Doctor, I had my own problem with the storyline, essentially the Dalek’s redemption through ‘emotions’ induced a kneejerk eye rolling. (Not sure how that works anatomically.) It’s just so original Star Trek and I guess I always felt Spock got short changed in those debates. Up until then I found it really quite engrossing. All the Doctor/Dalek parallels paying off the hints they’ve been dropping about the effect of the war. Anyway being reminded that the Daleks were engineered killers gave me an idea about the possible origins of the Reavers in Firefly/Serentity. I’ve been uncomfortable with the whole Reaver thing, since they’re explicitly supposed to be the equivalent of the Apache in classic Westerns. I don’t think you can leave things at that these days. I’m fine with monsters being monsters on BtVS. I felt the series did a lot of work to pinpoint the specific nature of that evil (lack of empathy, not of emotions) with Spike’s story. And just as Other doesn’t necessarily mean Evil, Evil doesn’t necessarily mean Other. But without the supernatural element that’s difficult to set up.
The Reavers are supposed to have gone crazy through being exposed to deep space but they seem too organised, too social for that kind of crazy. Manning spaceships and all. Could they have been made that way, maybe as a side effect of the type of experiments done on River, and put out in space to provide an Other for people to fear and cohere against? That fascist idea of perpetual war, an enemy, being necessary for society.
This weeks Dr. Who was the deal breaker for my other half. He’s not going to watch it any more and it must have been bad because complaining about it even elicited a back-handed compliment to BtVS. It did manage to make the eponymous Dalek seem scary but that doesn’t count because it’s not a criteria you’d apply to a brand new series. No, the storylines are crap and the science is terrible. Last straw for his suspension of disbelief was the contaminated Dalek ‘mutating’ towards a higher moral purpose. Lamarkist claptrap. Mutation is random, the successful ones get selected and that’s all there is and need ever be. We'll accept vampires with no breath, noises in space and Scully identifying human DNA from two bands on a Southern blot but will never, never tolerate assertions that contradict evolutionary theory.
Nature has an article on the rise of ‘intelligent-design’ on US college campuses:
The arguments are familiar: some biological systems are too complex, periodic explosions in the fossil record too large and differences between species too great to be explained by natural selection alone.
After reading it I’m still not at all clear how this is a subject that can be taught separately. If we’re not teaching students to think critically about scientific results and their current explanations as a matter of course, we really are failing them. And the implication that intelligent-design means accepting that some phenomena cannot be explained and that therefore we should stop asking questions about them is anti-science at a far more fundamental level than any creationist claims that the Earth is only a few thousand years old.
I get the feeling I’m missing something. Evolution does seem to be important to scientists beyond those active in field – in an Guardian article a few weeks back the usual suspects were interviewed about what scientific ideas they thought it was most important to get across in schools. Natural selection was the single most popular choice. Darwinism is philosophically disorientating. I still remember the moment of understanding it for the first time and simultaneously losing my religion. Almost on aesthetic grounds. I’m going to hell for the pretty.
Back to the Doctor, I had my own problem with the storyline, essentially the Dalek’s redemption through ‘emotions’ induced a kneejerk eye rolling. (Not sure how that works anatomically.) It’s just so original Star Trek and I guess I always felt Spock got short changed in those debates. Up until then I found it really quite engrossing. All the Doctor/Dalek parallels paying off the hints they’ve been dropping about the effect of the war. Anyway being reminded that the Daleks were engineered killers gave me an idea about the possible origins of the Reavers in Firefly/Serentity. I’ve been uncomfortable with the whole Reaver thing, since they’re explicitly supposed to be the equivalent of the Apache in classic Westerns. I don’t think you can leave things at that these days. I’m fine with monsters being monsters on BtVS. I felt the series did a lot of work to pinpoint the specific nature of that evil (lack of empathy, not of emotions) with Spike’s story. And just as Other doesn’t necessarily mean Evil, Evil doesn’t necessarily mean Other. But without the supernatural element that’s difficult to set up.
The Reavers are supposed to have gone crazy through being exposed to deep space but they seem too organised, too social for that kind of crazy. Manning spaceships and all. Could they have been made that way, maybe as a side effect of the type of experiments done on River, and put out in space to provide an Other for people to fear and cohere against? That fascist idea of perpetual war, an enemy, being necessary for society.
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no subject
Date: 2005-05-01 07:43 pm (UTC)Nice thought re the Reavers.
no subject
Date: 2005-05-01 09:23 pm (UTC)