During the past year scientists have been celebrating the work of Charles Darwin for the insight the 19th century naturalist had into how evolution works. It is truly amazing how much Darwin got right, but there was also a lot that Darwin didn't know. Indeed, Darwin recognized a group of disciplines that were relevant to what he was proposing, from paleontology to embryology, but despite his discoveries there were still mysteries in each field. A new NOVA program, What Darwin Never Knew, looks at what we now know about some of the questions Darwin's research raised but could not immediately answer.
Despite the title of the show, however, the first portion of the program might as well have been called "What Darwin Knew." The show briefly recapitulates how Darwin developed his idea of evolution by natural selection, but I must admit that it is a rather poor summary. Darwin is discussed out of context as if he was working in isolation. There is no mention of Richard Owen, Charles Lyell, John Gould, A.R. Wallace, or any of the other naturalists who influenced Darwin's work. I know the show is meant to honor Darwin but I would hope that, 150 years after the publication of On the Origin of Species, we could move beyond such narrow-sighted idolization.
The rest of the program is a series of scientific vignettes about evolutionary research using genetics and embryology. Flies with glow-in-the-dark wings, sticklebacks that lost their spines, finches with funky beaks, the legs of Tiktaalik, light and dark mice, and humans all feature in the second half, and the conclusions derived from each case are presented as stuff "Darwin didn't know." (You could make a fair drinking game out of the show by taking a drink every time this line is uttered.) I will not spoil all the details for those of you planning on tuning in, but a major emphasis is placed on regulatory genes in each of these examples to illustrate how large differences can be produced through relatively small changes.
As my wife commented while watching the show with me, however, these stories are not told very well. The examples are presented one after another without being tied to a strong narrative, and in some cases the evidence presented does not support the conclusions presented by the narrator. This approach quickly became tiresome. The science is presented in an accessible way, that much is true, but the program's latter half seems to get lost within itself.
Furthermore, some of the last segments are marred by an insistence on human exceptionalism. Yes, our species is unique, but so is every other! Even so, the program highlights what it believes to be differences between us and apes, namely opposable thumbs and a big brain. But many other creatures (including our primate relatives) both have opposable thumbs and brains as large, if not larger, than our own relative to body size (i.e. capuchin monkeys and Neanderthals for this latter trait). These traits alone can not explain art, architecture, music, and all the other things the show stresses separates us from other animals. The research relevant to these traits in our species is interesting, but by presenting them out of context the show provides a rather shallow view of our species and our relatives.
As with many science documentaries these days, What Darwin Never Knew left me with mixed feelings. There were so many small historical and scientific errors in it that I could not list them all, yet the show still contains some solid segments. In all honesty I was a bit bored with it by about the halfway mark, but then again I might have enjoyed the show more had I not already been familiar with much of its content. With a stronger narrative and the correction of a few mistakes it could have been a much better show, but such as it is I finished watching the show more out of a sense of personal obligation than actual interest.
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I liked the animation of Tiktaalik walking across the desk. That was the highlight for me. The rest of the time, my wife watched the show while I did a puzzle and listened to it.
I enjoyed the show in general, but found some of the evo-devo stuff with humans to be a little too credulous. The "a-ha, this is the magic gene that makes us human [or tetrapod, or whatever]" made for good TV, but I found myself rather skeptical about some of the claims.
For all its good stuff, the show was unfortunately nearly as riddled with errors as some of the recent Discovery dinosaur stuff. You've pointed some out.
And among many others:
* Perpetuating the myth "one Darwin finch type per island" (wrong story there: the geographic speciation story works for tortoises [touched upon] and mockingbirds, but not the finches; their story is adaptive ecological radiation)
* Perpetuating the myth that Darwin considered Glyptodon and Megatherium as direct armadillo and sloth (respectively) ancestors, when his notes clearly show that these were central to his realization of divergence from common ancestors.
* Reusing the same animation again and again and again and again...
* Wrongly stating that transformations were the bane of Darwin's work. Far from it!! He clearly showed how these transformations could work from intermediate steps. The show kept on missing the point: that evo-devo was the "missing link" (heck, they could have used this phrase accurately here!) between Mendelian genetics and inheritance on the one side and actual phenotype on the other.
* They missed a great opportunity to show cases of how evo-devo worked specifically. They ALMOST got their with the finch beaks: if they spent just a few minutes further they could have shown (with some cool animation, actually) how the increase in intensity or timing of different gene products actually produced the different beak types.
* One of the biggest errors, in my opinion, was glossing over the deep homologies issue in evo-devo. To spend more time in showing how the same genes that control eye development in fruit flies and in vertebrates would be worth it: it is still a very cool discovery.
Thanks for the comment/list, Thomas. The show burned me out, I was waiting for it to be over from about the halfway point on, so I was in no mood to write out an entire list. It really is a shame. The show had potential but it was so full of errors I couldn't enjoy it. Or was it just me, or did the limb posture for Tiktaalik walking around look really weird? From what I have read its arms were better for doing "pushups" off the bottom rather than walking around with a sprawling limb posture. It just looked off to me, but I guess it is to be expected given the traditional imagery of the creature that bridges the water and the land.
Yeah, I was unimpressed by the Tiktaalik animation, too. And even more by the "amazin' new discovery" approach to imply that we didn't already have a number of well-known lobefins on the one side and the definitely non-modern flippers of Acanthostega et al. on the other.
And this adds another annoying error: the idea that the paddlefish were "the fish most closely related to Tiktaalik" (rather than simply one of the better living examples of a basal rayfin, which is why it is important).
The thing is, you won't get the outrage from the Vert Paleo and dino-fan community over this one because it isn't about dinosaurs, and therefore has to (by definition) be a better class of documentary in their eyes...
"Perpetuating the myth that Darwin considered Glyptodon and Megatherium as direct armadillo and sloth (respectively) ancestors, when his notes clearly show that these were central to his realization of divergence from common ancestors."
I found that one most annoying not to mention a clear logical error. That one finds a giant armadillo fossils where we have armadillos are now does not in any way prove that today's armadillos evolved from giants. It is, however, suggestive that there is a genealogical relationship. But clearly it would still be possible that the giants are descended from a normal-sized species or armadillo and the living armadillos are not descended from giants.
And if this program was the only place that I had learned about evo-devo and recent history of the study of evolution, I would have thought that evo-devo was less than ten years old. Certainly the idea that genetic "switches" are important in evolution long predates the determination of how many genes the human genome has.
And contrary to the claim that this based on Sean Carroll's books, I don't see it. In spite that Carroll does appear a lot, the majority of this program is not based on material from Carroll's books. The program was more of a Darwin anniversary show spiced with some Your Inner Fish, a tad of Endless Forms, Most Beautiful, and a little of The Making of the Fittest and then combined with material that more naturally belonged to the recent "Becoming Human" three-part program.
I think that Nova would done better if they dropped the vast most of the Darwin references and replaced the two-hour program with a one-hour "Making of the Fittest" followed a week later by a one-hour "Endless Forms, Most Beautiful" with both shows being straight-forward adaptations of Carroll's books while avoiding what is not in them. If they want to do Tiktaalik stuff for instance, then do a third-hour for "Your Inner Fish" based on Neil Shubin's book. Indeed such trilogy would have been pretty damn awesome if done right.
Lurker,
Agree with you 100% as to your alternative version of the program!
I found the show to lose credibility after the second sentence. The first sentence: "One question, why is there such a stunning diversity of life?" Second sentence : "One answer, evolution."
Scientists claim to work soely on fact. So much is not known and even admitted to & yet they pass off the theory as absolute fact.
Come on scientists, admit it's a work in progress & you don't know everything about everything.