morphed, in a mediocre way
Nature’s greatest transformations have rarely been so… well… not all that exciting. In trying to fill their roster with shows about evolution for Darwin’s birthday, National Geographic made a rare misstep with it’s three episodes of Morphed. It’s not that the shows had any factual issues with them or that what they were talking about was all that controversial or exciting. And that’s part of the problem. Morphed was just not a show that draws you in and keeps your attention. And if you’ve taken a few biology courses and watched the BBC’s follow up to its special about dinosaurs, Walking With Prehistoric Beasts, you won’t see or hear anything you didn’t already know. The narration seems choppy and its deep tones are overwhelming at times.
While this may sound like nitpicking of the highest order, I also wanted to bring attention to an unfortunate slip in narration every now and then, talking about how an animal is “built” or how it “adapted to its environment.” While most of the show’s intended audience knows that it’s just a slip of the tongue or a figure of speech, it still brings pseudo-Lamarckian terminology into a scientific program. Living things don’t so much adapt as win a genetic lottery. Evolution being presented as a process is not only confusing for people who never really studied the subject or were never really allowed to by authority figures who sought to undermine their education, it’s also scientifically incorrect.
Popular science shows can’t continue to portray evolution as a guided process or keep talking about evolutionary adaptations when they mean a random mutation that allowed an animal to do something new and survive in a different environment, then wonder how people could view the theory with skepticism. It’s like any mixed message. When you tell someone that he or she is free to go out when you really want the person to stay home with you, you can’t be mad that your strategy might backfire. Likewise, you can’t talk about evolution as random change when your educational shows describe it as some sort of purposeful process with purple prose and wonder why some people might be confused about the theory.
