ALPHA X-MAN: James McAvoy is Charles Xavier, aka Professor X, a powerful telepath who can read and control minds, recruits other mutants to stop the greatest threat the world has ever known.
Image: Photo: Murray Close, TM and Copyright 2011 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. All rights reserved.
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In X-Men: First Class, the latest film about the popular comic book superheroes, one of the mutant characters goes by the nickname Darwin because he has the power of "reactive evolution." He instantly adapts to any threat: toss him in water and he sprouts gills; hit him with a club and his skin turns to armored plates.
Biology mavens in the audience may object that this form of evolution is more or less the opposite of what Charles Darwin proposed with his theory of natural selection. If anything, the mutant’s abilities are more in line with the rival, disproved theories of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, who argued for the heritability of acquired characteristics. But maybe the name "Lamarck" would sound too much like a maitre d' rather than a mutant to fans.
That misappropriation of Darwin’s identity is emblematic of the X-Men films’ tortured portrayals of key ideas in biology. The movies are of course meant to be fun, not factual, and it feels like the height of stodginess to warn: “SPOILER ALERT: This film about superpowered telepaths and shape-shifting blue women is not a science documentary." There’s probably no point in wasting time discussing how various powers conferred by the fictional X-gene mutations violate physical laws, because they are really fantasy devices like the spells in Harry Potter books.
Nevertheless, it is worth looking at some of the film’s errors about evolution and speciation because they may be reinforcing some popular misconceptions.
X-Men: First Class, like earlier movies in the series, repeatedly invokes the idea that its mutants and humans are engaged in an evolutionary struggle for dominance like the one between humans and Neandertals thousands of years ago. Professor Xavier and Magneto talk about the Neandertals having resentfully looked at the superior new species moving in, and the moderns having displaced and slaughtered the older species.
At least this movie has the excuse of being set in 1962, when such ideas about human evolution were more common. Neandertals were then typically portrayed as a species of mentally inferior brutes who could not compete with the smarter, more technologically and culturally advanced Homo sapiens who evolved later.
But today, the paleoanthropological picture of the relations between Neandertals and modern humans is completely different. Skeletal reconstructions show that Neandertals had brains larger than our own, and archaeological digs reveal that they had a distinct culture but sometimes used some of the same tools that our ancestors did. Indeed, studies published in 2010 by Svante Pääbo's group at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig concluded that several percent of non-African people’s genes came from Neandertals, so Neandertals may not even have been a species apart.
Most important, little evidence supports the idea that Neandertals and modern humans were in much open conflict. During the last ice age, Neandertals may simply have fared poorly and gone extinct largely on their own, with modern humans later occupying their old territories and perhaps breeding with some stragglers. One recent controversial study has even suggested that Neandertals were essentially gone from Europe by 40,000 years ago, thousands of years before modern humans arrived. In any case, Professor X and Magneto had it wrong.
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18 Comments
Add CommentYou're just jealous you can't lick the back of your head.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSo, if they wrote in a character called "Hawking" who can blow black out of his ars then it would reinforce the idea that the universe was created by an omnipotent maker? C'mon, don't blame fiction for reinforcing bad ideas. Blame the right wing republicans for taking evolution out of K-12 text books since the 1960's. Just let me enjoy the movie!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisExactly.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisTypical for comics, but they still are enjoyable.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFor the record, the character of "Darwin" never existed in the X-men comics. He was invented solely for this movie, to insure that the black guy dies first. Hollywood writers are even worse at science than comic book writers, which is really saying something.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDarwin is a character in the Marvel Comics X-men franchise and not an invention of Hollywood - please don't give them credit where undue. http://marvel.com/universe/Darwin.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe movie was fun, and as you mention, definitely not a module in Genetics 101. The same applies to movies like Terminator. I dint think this article is informative. Highlighting obvious misconceptions that were meant only to entertain Is no subject for SA.
X-Men was inspired by racism not biology. Once you understand this the talk about Neanderthals makes more sense. The characters are worried about conflict between normale humans and mutants.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisTrying to define one species from another is a human attempt to apply an ordered ideal to a chaotic reality. Any particular person could potentially be the fore-bearer or a new "species" given the correct level of isolation in a group to allow the gene to spread. For example I may have a mutant gene for the tissue in my knee. If my gene is spread enough, my descendants may develop noticeably superior knees based on my gene. Is it a new "species" of organism? Who cares?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAre you in this sentence "as a species must under at least one widely-known biological conception of a species" referring to Mayr's biological species concept?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisC'mon! Are you serious? That concept is long proved not to be good... Are you still reading basic biology books? Get on trend guys..
Cheers
Lucas
Are you in this sentence "as a species must under at least one widely-known biological conception of a species" referring to Mayr's biological species concept?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisC'mon! Are you serious? That concept is long proved not to be good... Are you still reading basic biology books? Get on trend guys..
Cheers
Lucas
Re: "Biology mavens in the audience may object that this form of evolution is more or less the opposite of what Charles Darwin proposed with his theory of natural selection."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhat Darwin did or did not propose regarding natural selection, did not meet with universal acceptance:
"The view that natural selection, leading to the survival of the fittest, in populations of individuals of varying characteristics and competing amongst themselves, has produced in the course of geological time gradual transformations leading from a simple primitive organism to the highest forms of life, without the intervention of any directive agency or force, is thus the essence of the Darwinian position....That natural selection directs the course of evolution Darwin could not prove by an appeal to facts."
[W. R. Thompson, F.R.S. 1956. Introduction. In: Charles Darwin. Origin of Species. Everyman Library No. 811. London: J. M. Dent and Sons. Reprinted with permission. Evolution Protest Movement. 1967. NEW CHALLENGING ‘INTRODUCTION' TO THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES. Selsey, Sussex: Selsey Press Ltd., pp. 6, 7]
Dammit!! I sure am!!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisRemember. Michelle Bachman wants to eliminate the teaching of evolution in Louisiana (and presumably elsewhere) under the pretense of "states rights". Of course, she wants to replace it with ID which kind of undermines her states rights spiel.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNo one cares what W.R Thompson's quote mined opinion is.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMy own beliefs aside, Darwin's theories said nothing about the presence of a deity and hence Thompson is wrong from the start.
- There is plenty of evidence regarding natural selection and speciation. Just google ring species or Island lizards and speciation.
I'm not getting into this here. Google is amazing. So are books.
Way to go, reproducing more common errors about evolution while trying to dispel them. Go take a Biological Anthropology class. While the Neanderthals may have had a larger brain case, this does not indicate a larger brain. Neanderthals were better adapted to the cold, and had a thick layer of fat around their brains. Current thought is that their brains were approximately the same size as Homo sapiens.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisStan Lee and Jack Kirby intended the X-Men defending a world that hated and feared them to be a metaphor for the civil rights struggle, with Xavier essentially representing nonviolent struggle as typified by Martin Luther King, and Magneto being analogous to militant black nationalists. Xavier, like King, wanted people to be judged on their behavior, not their genetic heritage. Magneto, like Malcolm X (at least in the early 1960s) believed his people could not be equal or safe unless they had separate communities that they controlled (one of his first acts is to try to depose a small Central American government to create a mutant-run nation).
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThat said, Xavier isn't wrong about evolution *as it works in the fictional Marvel universe.* Among many other differences between the fictional universe of Marvel comics and our own universe is one directly relevant to whether Charles Xavier is completely off-base talking about a "next step in evolution." The evolution of humans in Marvel's universe was interfered with by beings called Celestials, essentially beings composed of energy and thought using 2000 foot tall anthropomorphic vehicles to interact with material beings. The premise is that they do this to see if species have the potential to produce beings that can achieve their level of existence. In essence, this is how Celestials reproduce.
The results were Eternals, genetically static nigh-immortals; Deviants, genetically random beings whose offspring resemble their ancestors only coincidentally if at all; and humans, in whom was instilled a potential for periodic accelerated mutation leading to superhuman "mutants." In other words, Marvel humans are not real world humans, and Marvel history is not real history. What Xavier says makes sense in the fictional setting, and that's all that is required of science fantasy, which is the category into which most super-hero literature falls.
Correction, "evolutionary errors of liberal propagandists who don't repeat the Atheist Liberal cult anti-Christian propaganda and dogma correctly." Why don't you be more specific John Rennie, you and all the other Atheist Liberal cultists who spout Scientology nonsense? Example: "scientists believe" what scientists you Scientologist moron? Ooooh, the only ones, the atheist liberal ones that believe in global warming OOOPS I MEAN CLIMATE CHANGE, SORRY (can't say global warming cuz it might look bad if the planet starts getting colder).
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Opponents of evolution want to make a place for creationism by tearing down real science, but their arguments don't hold up" because you said so John, and whatever you keep parroting out your cultist mouth is true cuz u kept parroting it. 15 Responses to Mainstream Scientologist Nonsense:
1) "Nanny nanny boo boo I know you are but what am I" is not science.
2) Ad hominem attacks are not science moron John.
3) Random bombs don't make men, if you give them billions and billions and bildons of years time.
4) Star light problem? Who, us creationists have that problem? Question: Why is was an "epoch" period inserted into big random bang theory? Hint: star light problem. Hypocrites.
5) Electrified mud has never been shown to spawn life. Stop repeating the Miller Urey million dollar CONTROLLED EXPERIMENT failure.
6) Laws don't write themselves, bombs don't write laws, either physics laws or moral laws, nor can they program anything, including through DNA.
7) DNA doesn't want to do anything, stop telling people that it wants to duplicate itself. It's not magic you idiots.
10) Beneficial mutations, and how many of those have ever occurred? Are not evidence that bacteria can turn into men let alone other kinds of entirely different bacteria.
11) There is still no evidence for evolution. Why then do you believe it? There is only evidence against it, just like the big magic bang that exploded juz cuz. Bacteria don't turn into men.
12) If there is no God, why then do you preach morals, and try and force gay sex down everyone's throat? Why do you get enraged if others disagree with your arbitrary feelings and whims? Are you God that you may command others how to live and what to think? If you complain about lies then you are automatic liars, because if there is no God, who is the One who decides right and wrong? Hence why atheists easily massacred over 175 million in the past 100 years in their attempt to dominate the world, even babies without anesthesia, while trying to save every other animal.
You have a gods of gaps problem, not creationists. Your noodle monster god won't solve anything, nor will speculations that can never be proven.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisChristians however have no gap problems, archeology, which Mainstream Scientologist cultists like John Rennie ignore, fake scientists like him ignore, is on the side of Christians, as is logic. Merely making lists of logical fallacies, you few atheists who can tolerate looking at them (since you know everyone of them refutes you) does not make you logical, anymore than looking through a microscope or telescope and proclaiming, "Wow, design, evolution did it!"
That's not science, that's dumb.
eternian.wordpress.co m/evidence