OK, it’s cute and catchy, but it’s also got a very awkward sudden jump from the mammal-like reptiles to the primates, and unfortunately it perpetuates the “evolution as a process on rails” concept by showing a single lineage — ours, of course. Why not show a progression to a modern rose, or a fly, or a fish? Or better yet, illustrate evolution as an ongoing explosion of diversity? I know, I know, it isn’t as engrossing to self-centered humans, the market for this sort of thing.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
All I could think of through that whole thing was Nine Inch Nails and Spartans.
Cute and catchy ? This is just what you get when you cut (or rather hack) into pieces the BBC documentary “Walking with monsters”, keeping only the “transformation” moments. Of course, the end segment, after the jarring cut you mention, comes from another film, namely “Walking with beasts”, by the same team. No credits given? Not very nice!
“WWM” is something I had been eagerly expecting ever since the beginning of the “Walking” series. It’s great, but juste a little bit disappointing at some times. The animation looks a bit weirder than in the preceding episodes, especially Anomalocaris, and the young Dimetrodons that climb trees and look like they’re iceskating on them.
Yeah, the jump all the way to apes was extremely jarring. It’s like they got to therapsids, realized they still had over 200 million years to go, and were like, “Fuck it. Let’s just throw in some Australopithecines and call it a day.”
Ripped straight from a discovery channel special without credit. Awesome. Thanks 5 min!
Well, there was a brief digression into archosaurs there.
Also, better to say “reptile-like mammals.”
Cue David Marjanović with the better-informed counterargument.
If that’s true… boooo. Video plagiarism is for creationists.
One of the goofs from WWM is that they have the diapsid Petrolacosaurus morphing into the synapsid Dimetrodon.
They should have moved backwards through time, with the otehr lines joining up in the march back to the ancestor, like Dawkins’ “Ancestor’s Tale”
The moment you start selling DVDs to roses or squid or amoebas, then you can talk. Until then, you should probably just accept that humans create entertainment almost explicitly for human consumption.
Yeah, that’s one of the things I liked about Ancestor’s Tale — the reverse chronology with all the joinings gave a better feeling for the diversity and bushiness of life’s history, than the usual molecules-to-man narrative, which inevitably winds up feeling like Chain Of Being rehash.
Can you imagine the fundies doing a similiar version from
their twisted viewpoint? From divine creation to slime
mold in six thousand years! Then again, slime mold has a
more useful function than the crazed idiots of religion.
Christophe Thill is right about the plagiarism. When I watched “Walking with Monsters” on the Discovery Channel, one of the sponsors was hawking Christian music CD’s: poor audience targeting, I’d say.
“humans create entertainment almost explicitly for human consumption.”
Have to disagree a bit. Eleven point six billion spent on pet toys last year. That’s a lot of scratch.
So… placoderms were hunted by giant underwater scorpions?
Everything goes better with giant underwater scorpions!
Yeah, I saw the specific program with the dimetrodons and the tiny cute reptile/mammal things. Then I lost track of the show.
Oh well, that’s what Netflix is for! That and “The Day the Universe Changed.”
I’m just a layman, but around the 5:00 minute mark when they wanted to spend 30 seconds on Australopithecus, I said, hey, wait a minute, where’s the rest of the Mesozoic? And where did the year count go?
Not very well spliced together, IMO. But overall fun.
Well, the branching isn’t emphasized in this, but the “transformation” sequences were nicely done, with years flying past in the display, time-lapse skies, variations in skin pigmentation, and the afterimage of the ancestor for comparison. Clumsier animations of this type confuse some people, who leave with the impression that massive morphological changes take place within a single generation, as if one might be born as a fish, then grow legs and prance around on land as a juvenile, before brachiating through the trees as an adult. I suspect there’s some relationship between this naive interpretation of such animations and odd queries like “if evolution is real, why don’t cats become dogs,” “why are there still apes,” etc.
So kudos to the Discovery channel or BBC or whomever, for creating a more foolproof animation to show the scale of time and generations that is relevant to the process.
While it goes in reverse and it alot shorter, I think this one is better:
More than (worse than!) an awkward sudden jump.
“Aha, see that’s where GOD inspired/designed/poofed/whatevered MAN into existence.”
This thing is a crying shame. Up to that point, it’s wonderful, eloquent … then suddenly ‘poof’ … Primates!
Ugh.
Surely everyone has seen the Guiness Evolution of Man commercial…
The required footage to fill in the jump (gap) does occur in Walking with Beasts. Perhaps the producers thought a bit less plagiarism might reduce prison time?
There are so many ‘flights of imagination’ in the various ‘Walking with’ series, one does not know where to start other than to say that Walking with dinosaurs was the best of the four and each successor was decidedly worse.
I would just like to add here that first of all the jump to australopithicus from allosaurus is because the series Walking with beasts ends at archosaurs. So the person who put it together for youtube just added that end part from another walking with series.
And second I know all you scientist can rip the Walking With series to shreds(and rightly so)but think of what it has done for children. Because of these shows my six year old son and five year old daughter have a basic understanding of evolution. Infact they have opened my eyes too. There is no better way to fight ID and foolish religion then to teach our children and teach them young. Believe me. I am trying to do my part.
Hm, how many mistakes was in that?
From what I could see there were more mistakes than anything else.
False connections does not a proper science program make…
I remember a conversation with a creationist who assumed that in the theory of evolution the change happened exactly as it is shown in this video – in other words a five minutes morphing got you from fish to man (rather than a four hundred million year gradual change over millions of generations).
From this he concluded that evolutionists were stoopid. (Obviously he was impervious to convincing otherwise).
I think I want that on a t-shirt.
The score really adds something, though. I like how the music ramps up when Tiktaalik comes strutting out of the water like some badass Tarantino transitional gangsta and rears his head, all like, “I just made it onto land, bitches.”
Or more likely Acanthostega, not Tiktaalik.
I’ve seen these two DC special several times in their entirety. The reason for the primate “poof” is because I do not believe DC did any transitionary special, but maybe I just haven’t seen it. Sicne this video is entirely ripped from DC’s shows, it’s no wonder there’s the poof effect. I do see the point about the “evo on rails” idea. That’s another drawback of sourcing someone else’s work entirely. As far as showing the evolution of other things goes, have such elaborate CGI specials been made about plants and other organisms? I would assume that probably not nearly as much cash has been spent on explaining the evolution of those things visually as has been dumped into organisms that are more like us. That one’s a matter of time and money I wager.
The time-lapse stuff only happens in Walking With Monsters (which ends with the rise of the dinosaurs). Mammals don’t appear much in Walking With Dinosaurs, nor do primates in Walking With Beasts (outside the australopithecine segment, and the final one), so I think that’s the reason for the sudden jump there.
“Or more likely Acanthostega, not Tiktaalik.”
I believe it’s identified as Hynerpeton in the actual special…
Hated it.
This evolution by rail business has got to stop. There is no bigger disservice than to show a single lineage. No wonder 50 percent of Americans doubt evolution happened.
Evolution, if anything, is best represented by an ever expanding bush rather than a single growing leafless vine.
As the era clock was running, they should have shown thousands of branches with the line in question weaving back and forth as we manuevered through representative populations. Whole branches and even more twigs are obliterated by extinction episodes like an F-4 dodging anti-aircraft fire. What better way to demonstrate speciation events and how fortunate any lineage is to make it.
And what was the deal with that fish growing these tiny useless budlike hind feet out of no-where? Crap! The best thing about transitional forms is that all their body parts are doing something useful…always. Isn’t that what we try to hammer into the heads of the creationists? No half-formed wings, vestigal doesn’t mean useless, no third arm out of your kid’s forehead.
Better they should have shown a shallows-waddling lobe-fin with nice sturdy pelvic fins to work with.
Sometimes I wonder if the people who write for science shows even understand evolution. They are contributing to the problem as far as I can tell.
J
The allosaurus to primate jump was no more jarring than the change in plant life- from a few scrubby desert-like bushes to jungle in the wink of an eye. I always sort of thought that plants were the true pioneers in this story.
The linear nature of evolution as (mis)represented in the video also plays into the whole Intelligent Design meme where it was all an elaborate buildup to the god-like human. I thought that by late adolescence most of us realized that we aren’t the center of the universe (individually or collectively). There is a much richer story here, but I guess the video works as a theatrical trailer.
This is straight up taken from several BBC series, later shown on the discovery channel. In order of the period of evolution they covered they are: Walking with Monsters, Walking with Dinosaurs, and finally walking with Prehistoric Beasts. They kind of cover the arrow of time following from the Cambrian to something like 10K years ago. There is a extra disk Walking with Allosaurus), a disk that somewhat explains the thinking of the program going from bones and behavior of existing life to what is on the program.
I own all of them, bought them from Amazon.com for about $60 all together. I bought them for my five year old so she would not be raised in ignorance in America. They are not quite age appropriate. The animals do a lot of fucking and fighting. Many somewhat uncomfortable teachable moments sprinkled through out. There are scenes where two Basilosaurus are getting it on, tails flapping everywhere and my daughter asks me “Is that an octopus daddy?” The neat morphing scenes featured here she asks “is he growing up?” as if it’s one individual changing. All kinds of teachable moments.
There are perhaps some misconceptions of evolution passed along. While the three series do show many many branches of life there is the evolution on rails human oriented thread going through or occasionally behind all of them. While the fucking and fighting bit is so dramatic I not sure they accurately portrayed the amount of time life got to lay out on the beach and bask in the sun over the last 530 million years. It’s very nice that many of the animals featured are female, are mothers with varying amounts of maternal instincts.
I loved the Monsters series most. I’m so happy to have something that shows truly ancient life, even back to the Cambrian. I love the dinosaurs but I love the wide and varied life before and after them more. There are mistakes. I don’t think the Anomalocarus was that hard bodied an animal just parts of him but they have Anomalocarus fighting and they sound like garbage trucks clanking together. This slight misrepresentation plays into a larger drama they have set up of arthropods -vs- vertebrates.
There are things that are imperfect about the series but the scope is epic and they are a great start. You can find some of the series on youtube looking for “walking with monsters” “Walking with prehistoric beasts” etc.
ooooh, I’d love to see the evolution of a rose (muahaha, would it still smell as sweet?). I even think it might be more convincing than that of a human: it may be easier for doubters to believe roses evolved from other flowers than to believe that WE used to be primordial slime…
Copernic beat me to it. One of evolutions strong points is in showing how mutations serve some purpose each step of the way and arn’t simply changes that have to happen so that we can get to the end product.
It’s the old argument of “What good is half and eye? 50 percent better than no eye at all” In this representation it would be that 50 percent is needed to get to a finished eye, which is dictated by whenever the time lapse stops.
All this of course leading people to believe that there is a design being followed, and thus a designer.
THIS. IS. EVOLUTION! [/300]
This is the one you want. From Cosmos:
Damn.
Just useless, and boring…
– either you show a nice advertising spot type Guiness Evolution of Man (30sec-1min) and it’s just a way to hammer E.V.O.L.U.T.I.O.N H.A.P.P.E.N.D !
– or you show a proper documentary so that people can actually understand how it happend, and why we’re 100% sure it did. And that takes at least 90 minutes.
This kind of cute and catchy “Music Video Clip” of 5min is neither, and the music is too bad to be shown on MTV.
Just thinking about it, but I think both types have still been underexploited.
In the ad spots for instance, I’d love to see this one done :
US President to meet for the first time with super intelligent Alien.
Alien speaks :
“Mr President, did humans dicover Evolution ?”
EVOLUTION really happened !
Just a suggestion, but I think Pharyngula would be a great way to stimulate a competition for some scenarios for good TV advertising spots (30sec) that help people waking up to the fact that Evolution really happened.
And why not work with a large online community to get it financed.
I’d donate at least 1000$ to a charity that would produce and advertise such spots, if they were good.
Don’t know if it’s been done before.
We gotta go beyond the internet and litterature. Because TV is still the media of choice for the people who don’t believe in Evolution. And there, we got guys like Bill O’Reilly and Ben Stein, who do so much dammage, it’s unbelievable.
it also perpetuates the idea of gradualism as the sole means of evolution while the fossil record suggests that most forms emerged and died out in the exact same configuration. While evolution IS the slow accumulation of minor changes, this happens in a blink of an eye when set against the entire life span of a species.
instead of a smooth gradient between lobe finned fish and tetrapods it would have been more accurate to have 20 seconds of lobe, 3 seconds of transition, then 20 more seconds of tetrapod.
They should have showed that atheists evolved from the chicken, because they not only have chicken characteristics–a head, eyes, mouth, skin, neck, heart, earlobes and legs (homologous structures), but they also have the chicken’s tendencies – they are chicken livered.
They hang around Christians like annoying little bugs hang around light, trying to inject their poison whenever they can.
But they don’t have the courage to even whisper to Moslems what they keep shouting at Christians.
(with apologies to Ray Comfort from whom I ‘borrowed’ this)
There are FOUR in the series: Monsters, Dinosaurs, Beasts, and CAVEMEN. Tangential is Allosaurus with a life and death of ‘big Al’ episode.
Gawdoffal stuff paleontologically. At least the BBC is trying to fund educational programming. The recent NOVA episode on a family whose members walked-on0all-fours was atrocious. There was a disservice to science in general and evolutionary biology like no other in TV history (except Sunday mornings)
Project much?
Are you out of your fucking mind?
Oh – it’s Ross.
Never mind.
Seriously, though. What about (for example) this?
But they don’t have the courage to even whisper to Moslems what they keep shouting at Christians.
You don’t live in the real world, do you? Oh ya…duh!
RamDude, we’re talkin about a guy who gets his material from Ray Comfort.
o_O
You don’t live in the real world, do you? Oh ya…duh!
He lives in a world where poison-injecting chickens hover around people.
(One has to wince at a metaphor that has people evolving from chickens then suddenly turning into insects which are apparently trying to sting a lightbulb. Don’t you suspect that Ray and Ross rolled up their IQ’s using a half-dozen D20’s?)
(Ack! Me slow! Windy quick!)
I especially disliked the visual device of spotlighting the critter du epoch with a “light from above” while speeding up the CGI morphs.
Don’t you suspect that Ray and Ross rolled up their IQ’s using a half-dozen D20’s?)
Hey, I like that. It’s pretty much how they deal with reality: it’s all make believe because they just believe whatever they want to.
And there are few things that Christians love more than getting together in groups to huddle in fear of the outside world, of all the meanies “persecuting” them (led by Satan, of course).
The same way they ignore scientific evidence to believe in ancient myths, they ignore real time evidence in order to increase their sense of paranoia. They just love that shit.
(And aren’t they cute when they try to be all “insulty”)
greg: “instead of a smooth gradient between lobe finned fish and tetrapods it would have been more accurate to have 20 seconds of lobe, 3 seconds of transition, then 20 more seconds of tetrapod.”
Good point. As it is, the time lapse forces you to wonder what good is half a limb… for millions of years.
Stupid video. I didn’t see Ron Perlman or Rae Dawn Chong anywhere.
Ah…that must not have been a campfire they were sitting around at the end.
“There are FOUR in the series: Monsters, Dinosaurs, Beasts, and CAVEMEN. Tangential is Allosaurus with a life and death of ‘big Al’ episode.”
I wonder if the Chased By Dinosaurs specials count as part of the “Walking With canon”…
That Moss guy wasn’t serious was he?
I get nearly all my fun from showing muslims that their ideas are empty. Chicago is diverse and I live near a religious school so they’re everywhere. Not to mention, picking on christians is like shooting fish glued to the end of the barrel.
Did I say Moss? Yeah, well I’m keeping it.
The gradual transformations, too, are sudden jumps from one branch of the tree to neighboring ones. No, we do not descend from dicynodonts. No, we neither descend from Dimetrodon nor from Edaphosaurus nor from anything else with a sail on the back. And so on.
BTW, Acanthostega and Ichthyostega were incapable of walking. WWM showed Hynerpeton, which is only known from a shoulder girdle… but probably wasn’t able to walk either. Oh, and, they were all deaf for practical purposes, except for Ichthyostega which had a very bizarre unique middle ear adapted for hearing in… water.
They aren’t mammals. The proposal is “reptile-like synapsids”, but it doesn’t really happen often that you need a cover term for everything closer to mammals than birds that isn’t a mammal.
The beastie shown isn’t a placoderm, it’s something jawless like Cephalaspis.
Well said.
No, no, no. You have the time scale all wrong. It’s more like 20 seconds of Ichthyostega stensioei, 3 seconds of transition, then 20 seconds of Ichthyostega watsoni, if you know what I mean. On the time scales of WWM, punk eek is completely invisible.
Not the earlobes, no. The outer ear in its entirety is unique to mammals. Even the middle ear is not homologous between mammals and birds. One of our three middle-ear bones, the stapes, is homologous to the only bone in bird middle ears, but in our common ancestors it didn’t serve a hearing function.
Do you even know where to find a chicken’s ears?
The gradual transformations, too, are sudden jumps from one branch of the tree to neighboring ones. No, we do not descend from dicynodonts. No, we neither descend from Dimetrodon nor from Edaphosaurus nor from anything else with a sail on the back. And so on.
BTW, Acanthostega and Ichthyostega were incapable of walking. WWM showed Hynerpeton, which is only known from a shoulder girdle… but probably wasn’t able to walk either. Oh, and, they were all deaf for practical purposes, except for Ichthyostega which had a very bizarre unique middle ear adapted for hearing in… water.
They aren’t mammals. The proposal is “reptile-like synapsids”, but it doesn’t really happen often that you need a cover term for everything closer to mammals than birds that isn’t a mammal.
The beastie shown isn’t a placoderm, it’s something jawless like Cephalaspis.
Well said.
No, no, no. You have the time scale all wrong. It’s more like 20 seconds of Ichthyostega stensioei, 3 seconds of transition, then 20 seconds of Ichthyostega watsoni, if you know what I mean. On the time scales of WWM, punk eek is completely invisible.
Not the earlobes, no. The outer ear in its entirety is unique to mammals. Even the middle ear is not homologous between mammals and birds. One of our three middle-ear bones, the stapes, is homologous to the only bone in bird middle ears, but in our common ancestors it didn’t serve a hearing function.
Do you even know where to find a chicken’s ears?
Now I see I didn’t misread: the title really is “How Evolution Happens”. No explanation whatsoever of mutation and selection… Misleading.
Now I see I didn’t misread: the title really is “How Evolution Happens”. No explanation whatsoever of mutation and selection… Misleading.
This video is a horrible representation of evolution.
Who cut this shit together is a fucking dipshit.
THIS IS AN ILLUSTRATION FOR PETE SAKES
I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it
The amount of time passage here is well beyond the understanding of any creationist. Plus, with the amount of years that pass, shown in just a few moments, we might as well be asking the creationists to have faith in evolution.
Yeah, but what does it illustrate? It’s a misleading view of evolution. Sure it’s an illustration, but how does that excuse it’s calamitous misrepresentation of pretty much everything that’s important about understanding evolution?
just a funny clip to me. you can use it as a videoclip(A):P
you gotta be a real dumbass to put something like this together. I am sorry but that is true. I think kent hovind has way better explanations that prove evolution WRONG.
And we know all this from a few bones found in the ground, no missing links and the fact that scientists are duped into it just because they cannot explain God. Sooooooo true
Actually, I think that the video is a wrong example, only shows the transformation, but doesn’t show why.
I can see a fish that suddenly have legs, but, why this legs appears?.
I think that if we want to show this to a person who doesn’t believe in evolution, it will be like a scifi movie, that things happen from nothing.
5 minutes to show evolution, is hard I guess.
Here is the backward evolution movie that a commenter above requested.
Fucking bull shit, non stop bull shit at that. Treat the Audience to 5 mins of FAKE, dumbass.
Well, there can be no “backwards evolution”, since “evolution” is just “change”, and the change can be in any direction. It’s backwards relative to the evolutionary trajectory that characterisies our lineage…
If there was nothing in the beginning then how could anything be started?
For each action there is a reaction, but where did the action come from way in the beginning……
The usual fish-to-humans progression-based story. Rather like trying to describe a tree by panning along a single branch, but without the actual branch point, let alone all the other branches.
The real thing is so much more creative.
To all the Christians reading this who are concerned about their problem of ‘something’ from ‘nothing’: ‘something’ always existed, ‘nothing’ is impossible. Stop worrying about it.
The Universe always existed and always will, and time only exists for humans.
Ah, what a delightful fiction this is. I liked the music too.
Well, Newton’s laws only apply once there is a universe for them to be applied to. The universe probably materialised from the quantum vacuum, which is nothing, in the sense of no space time, matter or energy.
Asking what “started” everything assumes something physical outside the physical universe. Anything beyond the physical universe would by definition be non-physical, and hence beyond comprehension. Since the Big Bang was the beginning of all beginnings, it’s like asking what is north of the north pole…
Well it’s nice to see we came from nothing to single cell organisms and then evolved miraculously into thousands of species instead of all looking identicle. Oh yeah. We started from the big bang. Where did whatever went bang come from again? I didn’t see that part. There was nothing then it went bang and now I have to go to work 5 days a week. If evolution doesn’t keep going is it really evolution? If it can’t be replicated in a laboratory is it really science? Sounds like another faith based religion to me minus the god part.
How about stop researching this crap with my tax dollars as well as space? We’re not going anywhere and who cares where we’ve been? All that money could be spent on diseases for the here and now.
I’m with #6, #57 and #58 and others between: it sucks.
Oh, and #75? I don’t want MY money spent on diseases.
Cretin.
I’d love to see an accurate version of this done exactly with the same quality and driving music.
You now have your homework.
#59: Like, “Aw, c’mon, it’s just a movie!” Right?
Aren’t we allowed to shun the misleading and express a preference for accuracy? Or criticize the perpetrators for swiping the work of others?
No, I don’t want to see an accurate version of this movie.
The challenge is to make an illustration that, instead of reducing evolution to a single trajectory for a single lineage, somehow captures the ideas of divergence and diversity. I don’t know how to do that. If some graphic designer wants to prove themself to be hot stuff, there’s the challenge for you.
I agree wholeheartedly, PZ. Not to worry: Workin’ on it…AND original too. You know, nice and bushy things with different branches every time it sprouts, even in identical starting conditions ;)
Wow. This is my first visit to Pharyngula, and it looks like I got here on a good day. I get to see a cool video and hear a bunch of biologists bitching about it. Here’s what I learned today:
I appreciate PZ Myers however, when he challenges what you need is a video just as cool as this one but that somehow “captures the ideas of divergence and diversity”…I suspect such a video would indeed clarify evolution to me, a non-scientific artistic-kinda guy.
By they way, I noticed the music has ten beats to the measure…really unusual (count it and see for yourself!)
Sagan’s Cosmos, evolution in 2 minutes sequence with white on black line drawings, was far more accurate and entertaining. Besides, it has Vivaldi as background music.
It says something of our culture that the 1 minute Guiness beer commercial does a much better representation of evolutionary history than a multi-million dollar BBC production.
I liked the Simpsons version better.
http://www.videosift.com/video/The-Simpsons-Evolution-Intro
Actually it’s here …
http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1750172
The problem with this video (which was on Digg yesterday) is that it doesn’t actually show “how evolution happens”, it just shows the result. For example that fish seems to sprout feet for no apparent reason. This isn’t how evolution works. Evolution is essentially “intelligent” in that it ends up causing adaptation to the environment with no “end goal” in mind. It’s neat to watch, but this certainly won’t convince any creationists (not that it was supposed to).
http://www.spymac.com/details/?2336771
reminds me of the music video by fatboy slim called “Right here right now”… which i liked better and had a funnier ending.
Nice music though :-)
That’s actually what I thought it was at first…
It’s more models and less CG, but I think that’s what they were ‘inspired’ by.
It’s Fatboy Slim – Right Here, Right Now
Spaulding said:
Clumsier animations of this type confuse some people, who leave with the impression that massive morphological changes take place within a single generation, as if one might be born as a fish, then grow legs and prance around on land as a juvenile, before brachiating through the trees as an adult.
Whoa, dude. That’s how I grew up! Wasn’t it that way for everybody else?
The beastie shown isn’t a placoderm, it’s something jawless like Cephalaspis.
Thanks Dave, but I was really more curious about the giant aqua-scorpion. I did a little cursory investigation and found, to my surprise, that scorpions do go back a very long ways and they were originally aquatic, so maybe it wasn’t as bizarre as I thought.
Why clp fnshd wth th nggrs trb.
i thought cool, NIN and evolution. If you watch closely you can tell that it’s not one animal they’re following, but a few. And the hacked together part at the end could have been left off. The author of the video wanted it to be 5 minutes and tie it in to humans somehow, so he left the last 45 seconds as an exercise for the viewer.
yes it`s beauteful clip