Product Details

• Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only. Read more about DVD formats.)
  
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B00130EYPS
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #224,047 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)

Editorial Reviews

GREAT LEARNING DVD

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Rather Well Done., January 17, 2012

By 

Gary Peterson (San Diego, California USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Howard Hughes Medical Institute: Evolution - Fossils, Genes and Mousetraps (DVD)

I was sorting through my DVD library the other day and found "Evolution: Fossils, Genes and Mousetraps." a film produced through the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. I have no idea how it got there. Probably my wife picked it up somewhere and thought it might be useful to me in that I teach a junior-level university course in Fossils and the History of Life at San Diego State. I systematically go through the history of life from the first (oldest) known fossils right up to modern life including Humans. It's old material and much of it has been known since my undergraduate days in the 50s. The fossil record is extremely enlightening (in fact, overwhelming) and how anyone could be familiar with the details of this record and take a stand against the concept of evolution is beyond my understanding. But, nevertheless, a certain percent of the general population takes such a stand and we thus have the "great debate" between the evolutionists and the creationists, or some other label of that type. Well, ho-hum. I've been associated with five universities (U. Colorado, U. Washington, San Diego State U., Stanford U., and U. Montana) and I've intermingled with countless hundreds to thousands of scientists in that general area of study. The "great debate" is taken seriously only in religious circles.

Well, there probably isn't a major (or minor) university around that doesn't have a geologist or biologist that gets satisfaction in going out into the community and engaging in the "ongoing battle," and it's probably a lot of fun. This DVD is one such lecture and is presented by Kenneth Miller, PhD. It's a well done piece of work. Dr. Miller is an excellent speaker and handles the materials well. My criticisms might be the equivalent of dotting a couple "i"s. The problem with the DVD, as I see it, is that most of the DVD is not about evolution, but about the debate between the evolution and non-evolution people and that battle has been over since my undergraduate days and decades before that. Well, I don't mean that to be too critical in that this lecture was directed to a high school class and the material was completely appropriate for that level of understanding. I guess my wife thought that maybe I might be able to use it in my junior class regarding fossils and evolution. No, I'm sorry. I just couldn't do that. I have too much more appropriate material to cover. If anyone was interested in this ongoing "debate," I could certainly recommend viewing the DVD. It's rather well done.

Gary Peterson

2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars brilliant lecture but not the last word on ID, December 31, 2008

By 

David C. Bossard "Challenger" (PA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Howard Hughes Medical Institute: Evolution - Fossils, Genes and Mousetraps (DVD)

A brilliant lecture by Dr. Kenneth Miller with a very useful index, a "must view", but not the last word on Evolution vs. Intelligent Design. I see it as one of a long series of (prospective) debates featuring proponents of both sides of the issue. Would that such a series appear, be well-produced and fairly argued. I am not hopeful.

The fact is, there is all sorts of evidence for intelligent design in creation, and in life itself. Budding biologists have to be carefully trained to ignore this evidence, or be shamed into ignoring it. In the early 1800s, before the juggernaut of Darwinism stoked up, many scientists, and in particular geological scientists, acknowledged the overwhelming evidence for intelligent design: read the large selection of 19th century science books available on the web and in print, including early geologists such as Hugh Miller, Baron Georges Cuvier and Sir Charles Lyell.

Because Dr. Miller is clearly respectful of Biblical religion, I would consider him a sympathetic participant in the evolution/religion debate. I loved his observation that even the Bible says that humans were created out of pre-existing material (the dust of the earth). I happen to agree with the implications of his observation. The Biblical creation of Adam and Eve involved two components: the dust of the earth and the image of God. Many Creationists seem to miss this and assume that the genes determine the human: not so -- the genes only determine the physical body; the image determines the soul. See the books: Francis S. Collins, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief and Steven Goldberg, Seduced by Science: How American Religion Has Lost Its Way, on the misplaced concern of some theologians for the implications of genetic engineering, as if the human genes themselves code for the human soul.

Nonetheless, Dr. Miller concedes too much to the views of the unsympathetic secularists. In particular I was disappointed (given his sympathy with the religious view) in his remark to the effect that unless God is "a Designer who wanted to fool us" he won't mislead scientists who are hell-bent on writing him out of the script -- cf. the remarks on the fused chromosomes at 31:30 (Ch. 13). He presents a straw man "Is there any way to interpret this factual data as evidence for an intelligent designer?" All intelligent designers that I know will agree that God re-used genetic code throughout creation history -- the evidence is overwhelming and universally accepted as far as I am aware, so his comments are an unworthy slur. This is the sort of blithering nonsense that one would expect from a Sagan, Hitchens God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything or Dawkins The God Delusion.

Random remarks:

* The Miller-Urey experiment at 68:40 (Ch. 30) does not demonstrate that life can arise spontaneously. All it shows is that some simple, short ammonia/carbon chains can arise naturally under the right conditions. This is as far from demonstrating that life can arise spontaneously as a nickel is from paying off the national debt. A respected text writer should not misrepresent the significance of such weak evidence.

* His remarks on panspermia (ch. 33) are excessively enthusiastic. Most mathematicians and physicists consider life on earth to be unique in the universe, to be such an improbable event that some postulate an infinitude of universes to justify its natural occurrence even this one time. The history of this line of argument goes back at least to Henderson's 1913 book, THE FITNESS OF THE ENVIRONMENT. AN INQUIRY INTO THE BIOLOGICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE PROPERTIES OF MATTER..

* Darwin's Tree of Life at 18:00 (Ch.8) is nothing of the sort. What Dr. Miller presents is a relatively small branch (chordates) of what is in effect a grove of trees (the 30 or so basic phyla) that arose suddenly in the Cambrian explosion and cannot be connected except by conjecture.

* I would have liked to see more experimental (as opposed to theoretical) evolution -- especially mention of the relatively new discipline of evolutionary development, "evo-devo" -- see Sean B. Carroll Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo Devo. The essence of evo-devo is that a lot of evolution has to do with the broad range of expression of a (relatively) fixed package of genes. His observations about the development of the mustard family and the origin of whales are great illustrations of evo-devo. They say little about how the underlying package of genes came about in the first place.

* He says nothing about the elephant in the room: the obvious, inexorable upward arrow of life, from the creation of the simplest prokaryote cell to humans. A balanced discussion would certainly mention this -- perhaps the strongest argument in favor of ID.

* His discussion of the human brain (Ch. 31) glosses over the huge controversy within evolutionary circles about the large problem that the support system required to feed and care for that brain would seem to be a big step backwards from the "survival of the fittest" point of view.

* He leaves out the most powerful argument in favor of evolution from a single original cell -- the universal, unique and (apparently) contingent "Central Dogma" shared by every living cell: so arbitrary and so complex that it seems overwhelmingly evident that the first living cell evolved (or was created) only once. Is the omission because the vast complexity of that first viable living cell would leave a person wondering how it could have arisen spontaneously? In this regard, he missed the opportunity in Ch. 37 to note how far viral "life" is from "real" life -- the virus has none of the coding for that complex machinery of the central dogma. See in particular that fascinating 1998 Seminar by the National Research Council: Size Limits of Very Small Microorganisms: Proceedings of a Workshop (Compass Series (Washington, D.C.).). This seminar was in response to the claimed "Mars fossils" which in the final analysis were too small to be actual fossils of any life form. One major contributer to this workshop was J. William Schopf: Cradle of Life: The Discovery of Earth's Earliest Fossils

I could say much more, but space (and my energy) is limited. I hope this gives a positive "upcheck" in favor of the DVD, as well as a warning that it is not the end of the ID debate.

hmschallenger