God and natural selection, hand in hand

Who cares? It is only a movie. I can't understand why the creationist's, especially the ID'ers, take works of fiction so seriously. A few years back Skeptic Magazine had an article about an ID creationist conference where the Clint Eastwood movie "High Plains Drifter" was analyzed in great detail by an ID'er with way too much time on his hands. Geesh!!! I guess that since they don't do any science, they have plenty of time to review fiction/movies.

One of the things that is lost in the new War of the Worlds is the aspect that the aliens defeat was bought about through divine action. In the time that Wells wrote the original, there wasn't a good understanding about how microbes evolved or how they caused infections. It naturally seemed like Gods action, even if somewhat indirect, to save humanity and to defeat the invading martians. Today, with modern understanding, that aspect of the War of the Worlds has been lost IMO. Which is kind of a shame, because that is one of the points that I think H.G. Wells was wanting to make to begin with.

Well, I remember that "God" is left in the Morgan Freeman voiceover, while the bit about natural selection is cut (although it is implied).

Any movie is a highly evolved and complex synthetic organism, the result of weeks or years of labor, and the product of chance and circumstance as well as artistic vision. By the time it reaches its final form in the marketplace (only to be superseded by the further revised DVD version a few months later), it has been through countless evolutionary phases, the result of thousands upon thousands of conscious and unconscious decisions by hundreds upon hundreds of people. In some cases, there's an Intelligent Designer at work (usually the director, but sometimes the producer or the writer or an actor or studio executives, and generally a combination of them all), but even the greatest filmmakers are hardly omniscient or infallible. Movies are also the product of innumerable unforeseen spontaneous mutations - accidents, mistakes, oversights, coincidences, and circumstances either propitious or adverse. Weather, personality clashes, personnel changes, scheduling limitations, health problems, labor disputes, disagreements over the endlessly rewritten screenplay (or the set design or a performance), budget battles, footage that doesn't cut together ... all of these things and many, many more affect the eventual state of the film that you see. In that sense, a finished movie is more like a snapshot - a fixed image of an evolving form at a particular moment in its arrested lifespan. Jim Emerson, "Why movies aren't for literalists"

I think the take-home message should be, "Humans don't rule planet Earth. If you want to take the planet for your own consumption, talk to the things in charge."

I can't speak at all to Wells' views on evolution, but I did see the movie, and I didn't think as much of it as many others seem to. It struck me as just another summer blockbuster with nothing particularly wonderful to make it stand out, though I did like the special effects.

I picked up on the creationist aroma of the voiceover at the end of the film, but by that point I had already decided that it wasn't a very good movie. Adding that bit of narration at the end was merely the fly perched on the feces, if you will.

When I was a kid I read the book (I had one of those boxed HG Wells sets), listened to replays of Orson Wells' radio show, and even enjoyed the very cheesy 1950s movie with the not very threatening alien deathrays inspired by streetlights.

May the god of good literary and movie taste forgive me, but I loved them all, and loved this movie too, in all its great effects and crappy science (even in the original there's no microbes on Mars!—jeez!—I never forgave HG Wells for that). Orson Wells is still the only person who's ever really taken this concept to a higher level. Oh, and the chick movie side of our crowd really liked the relationship between Tom Cruise and the little girl, even though they're all diehard "Save Katie" fans. Okay, I thought it was good too.

In case it wasn't obvious to you, this is Spielberg's post-9/11 Iraq War movie. It starts with a book report on the French occupation of Algeria, moves on to some hummus eating, then has the crazy-but-could-be-right guy (Tim Robbins no less) screaming at us that occupations never work. I'm sure that there's more in there that I missed.

If you want to see a really exquisite but not-well-enough-known movie with the French occupation of Algeria as a backdrop, watch The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Les Parapluies de Cherbourg) starring a very young and very captivating Catherine Deneuve.

Hint: Read the book. You would be better off.

I think the take-home message should be, "Humans don't rule planet Earth. If you want to take the planet for your own consumption, talk to the things in charge."

— Dave Cerutti

I had the impression to the H. G. Wells was a hard-core atheist. He was certainly a strong Marxist. Between that and the claims that he was an atheist, I was guilty of just assuming.

The idea that bacteria killed the invaders might be interesting and surprising in 1898, when maybe few people realized microbes even existed, but it is just plain stupid in 2005. This ruined the whole movie for me. The aliens were supposed to be technologically more advanced than mankind, they plained the invasion for maybe milions of years, so how is it they don't know about basic biology? WTF?

The aliens were supposed to be technologically more advanced than mankind, they plained the invasion for maybe milions of years, so how is it they don't know about basic biology?

I suppose, since these are in the public domain, it would be good to actually present the old time radio version of Orson Welles' War of the Worlds in MP3 format.
http://www.strobelite.net/MP3s/WOTW.mp3

Also, while I'm at it, there was a radio interview with both H. G. Wells and Orson Welles that took place two years after the original broadcast. This might help put some of this in historical context.
http://www.strobelite.net/MP3s/Interview.mp3

Finally, some writers decided to build a little comedy/sci-fi play around the radio show. I present: Orson the Alien!
http://www.strobelite.net/MP3s/Orson_The_Alien_.mp3

This was a good movie if you could ignore:

1) the improbable plot line (the aliens have attacked cities and so, our heroes, decide to journey to another city);
2) the senseless and unexplained events (aliens are spraying human blood around the planet);
3) the premise that aliens had been burying assault vehicles for a million years to destroy humans, and yet didn't bother destroying us a million years ago;
4) the wooden, self gratifying acting of Tom Cruise;
5) aliens have no knowledge of biology and bacteria, and yet they had been surveilling the planet and visiting it for a million years;
6) yet the aliens are super intelligent...

And focus only on the special effects.

This movie was about as good as the last space alien movie done by Tom Cruise's fellow scientologist. That movie was based on a novel by scientology's founder.

Both this movie and that movie made about as much sense as each other and both had about the same wretched level of acting and plot development.

The aliens were supposed to be technologically more advanced than mankind, they plained the invasion for maybe milions of years, so how is it they don't know about basic biology?

The last salient point in which the systems of these creatures differed from ours was in what one might have thought a very trivial particular. Micro-organisms, which cause so much disease and pain on earth, have either never appeared upon Mars or Martian sanitary science eliminated them ages ago.War of the Worlds, Book 2, Chapter 2

He was certainly a strong Marxist.

And let us not forget the current situation with us humans and smallpox. We cleverly drove smallpox extinct, stopped vaccinating, and promptly forgot about it. The result: in the course of a few decades, smallpox became one of the most dangerous potential terrorist bioweapons around.

So we would have to assume that the Martians had receptors for the disease bacteria, and biochemical pathways that were susceptible to the toxins. Wouldn't that mean that they had common ancestry with humans? Or maybe they just didn't have immune systems, in which case they were badly designed.

Bah. No **SPOILERS AHEAD** warnings.

:(

And let us not forget the current situation with us humans and smallpox. We cleverly drove smallpox extinct, stopped vaccinating, and promptly forgot about it. The result: in the course of a few decades, smallpox became one of the most dangerous potential terrorist bioweapons around.

"So we would have to assume that the Martians had receptors for the disease bacteria, and biochemical pathways that were susceptible to the toxins."

exactly - it's just as stupid as Independence Day when they load a mac virus into a space computer.

but Wells seems to have described evolution perfectly - "By the toll of a billion deaths man has bought his birthright of the earth". The crap about god putting things on the earth is just the idiom of the time. how much attention do you pay to "one nation under god"?

"The aliens were supposed to be technologically more advanced than mankind, they plained the invasion for maybe milions of years, so how is it they don't know about basic biology? WTF?"

Oh, I don't know. It seems to me that another, recent invasion undertaken by a mighty power has come-a-cropper against predictable obstacles that were somehow discounted by those who planned, advocated, and executed it. Sometimes you invade with the extra-terrestrials you have, and not the one's you'd want.

"As everybody knows"
^ I did not know, and now that I do, half of the movie's suspense is gone. I do not know how to express my frustration.

That is it, I am joining the Discovery Institute

I thought it was a terrific movie, perhaps the best of the year. I think the complaints about the plot and the aliens' behavior are silly and irrelevant. The film is one dazzling sequence after another. Spielberg is just a master filmmaker.

CT, I think Nick means that smallpox is extinct in the wild, leaving a just a few specimens alive in biowarfare labs. Said protected populations do pose something of a threat.

"What has killed more people in the last 20 years, smallpox or the smallpox vaccine?
How can smallpox be a threat if it's extinct?"

It's not extinct; the remaining smallpox is contained in controlled research environments, such as CDC laboratories.

Yeah, smallpox is extinct in the wild, but I think Russia and the U.S. each have a stock, and you know the security in Russia is air-tight.

Beyond that, there is always the possibility of a smallpox-infested corpse up in the permafrost in Alaska or something that could re-introduce it.

PS: Sorry about the "spoiler" thing, we don't do movie reviews on PT much so I forgot. Although it isn't exactly a secret that the microbes are the heros of War of the Worlds.

PPS: Thanks for posting the radio play.

At one point, H.G. Wells makes a suggestion that makes slightly more sense than Mars having no microbes: maybe they eliminated all of their microbes, or at least diseases, long ago: ... Eliminating microorganisms from a planet is probably impossible (unless you melt all the crust), but if the environmental decay of Mars resulted in the Martians living in artifical environments, they could have long ago made those microbe-free.

— Nick (Matzke)

Considering that faster-than-light travel is one big plot device nearly universal in scifi, and FTL is at variance with known science, I think we can give War of the Worlds a wee bit of slack.

So we would have to assume that the Martians had receptors for the disease bacteria, and biochemical pathways that were susceptible to the toxins. Wouldn't that mean that they had common ancestry with humans? Or maybe they just didn't have immune systems, in which case they were badly designed.

But by virtue of this natural selection of our kind we have developed resisting power; to no germs do we succumb without a struggle, and to many -- those that cause putrefaction in dead matter, for instance -- our living frames are altogether immune.War of the Worlds

"The idea that bacteria killed the invaders might be interesting and surprising in 1898, when maybe few people realized microbes even existed, but it is just plain stupid in 2005. This ruined the whole movie for me. The aliens were supposed to be technologically more advanced than mankind, they plained the invasion for maybe milions of years, so how is it they don't know about basic biology? WTF?"

In 1941, Germany was supposed to be more technologically advanced than the Soviet Union, so how is it the Germans didn't know about Winter? In 2003 the USA was supposed to be more technologically advanced than Iraq, so how is it they didn't know that Iraq didn't have WMD? Technological advancement is no match for stupidity.

In Wells' book, the aliens were only slightly more advanced technologically than humans. Their space ships were, after all, fired just like artillery rounds and plowed into the Earth in an uncontrolled descent. Their machines were tank-like, and could be destroyed by artillery if they could be hit. To prevent that, the aliens used gas warfare. They could obviously have been blown to hell by nuclear weapons. That's why the '50s movie had to have the aliens use force fields.

As to the current movie incarnation, I liked it. I liked the references to the book and to the '50s movie. I completely ignored any political references because they were irrelevent and mostly not very acute. Ebert's scientific nitpicks were the result of scientific ignorance (Tripods are not stable? Since when?) and not paying attention. The only things we know about the aliens are what people in the movie say, and they actually know nothing. No one knows how long the aliens' machines lay hidden. No one knows their motives. No one knows why they waited to start the invasion.

A lot of questions could be asked about the aliens' motives and actions (like, why erradicate humans in such an inefficient manner?), but remember that a central rule of science fiction is that the most important thing about aliens is that they are alien.

Wells was indeed an atheist. But his narrator wasn't.

I think (although it's just my personal interpretation) that Wells may have intended that as a warning against hubris. Yes, the Martians are far more technologically advanced than Man, but they're not omnipotent or immune to error. I believe the implication was that they had wiped out all disease-causing organisms so long ago in their history that they'd completely forgotten about the concept of illness. Thus, the idea that microbes might pose a danger simply never occurred to them.

...a tragic illustration of the baneful influence of Darwinism on humanity.

I can't understand why the creationist's, especially the ID'ers, take works of fiction so seriously.

1. Invading peoples have used 'germ warfare' as a tactic against other people (who lacked immunity to a specific disease) in the past. Perhaps Wells had this in mind when he wrote his novel?
2. What was acceptable science a century ago may seem silly now. Old science fiction novels benefit from upgrades that take change into account.
3. Tripods are quite stable providing they don't move! If a tripod 'walks', one of the legs must be out of contact with the ground temporarily, making it an unstable 'bipod'. Myself, I liked the 50's version with the alien ships floating above the ground. It makes no sense scientifically, but it looks cool!

> Those martians were far more advanced than any human being, but they fell to one of the most inferior species, the microbes.

Isn't this an evolutionary biology site? microbes are not "inferior".

I can't understand why the creationist's, especially the ID'ers, take works of fiction so seriously.

The voice-over at the end of Spielberg's WoW struck me as familiar: could it be taken from an earlier version?

Certainly this will be regarded as one of Spielberg's lesser efforts at best. This and the earlier Spielberg/Cruise movie (Minority Report) confirm a thesis I've long held: Spielberg just doesn't get science fiction.

More than 60 years ago, Robert Heinlein, John Campbell, et al established that sf ideas should be thought through for consistency: e.g., a society with flying automobiles won't pave a lot of highways. Yet MR features hi-tech cops who don't even have the communication gear used by police now for decades, an automated car factory in a rough neighborhood (in DC, yet) which lacks elementary alarm systems, etc. WW's electromagnetic pulse disables all vehicle solenoids in its zone except one on a shelf; yet far enough outside that zone that the electrical grid still works, functioning cars are rare enough to kill for.

Perhaps the dumbest moment in WW comes when Cruise uses his bathroom sink to wash the ashes of vaporized humans (what a waste of food, from the Martian POV) from his face and hair - only minutes after seeing the water mains for his neighborhood blown sky-high. (My candidate for the dumbest bit in MR would be when Cruise comes up with a baggie holding two magic eyeballs, not long after conspicuously losing one of the pair.)

Critical thinking studies may be more needed in the USC school of cinema than in biology classrooms - but such a project would probably cause Hollywood, and thus America, to collapse.

In the time that Wells wrote the original, there wasn't a good understanding about how microbes evolved or how they caused infections. It naturally seemed like God's action, even if somewhat indirect, to save humanity....

I had the impression to the H. G. Wells was a hard-core atheist. He was certainly a strong Marxist. Between that and the claims that he was an atheist, I was guilty of just assuming.

I especially liked the snooty tone of Dembski's into:

"Yes, Roger Ebert, the movie reviewer, has now weighed in on ID"

Yes, movie reviewers should mind their station in life and not weigh in on ID.

"3. Tripods are quite stable providing they don't move! If a tripod 'walks', one of the legs must be out of contact with the ground temporarily, making it an unstable 'bipod'. Myself, I liked the 50's version with the alien ships floating above the ground. It makes no sense scientifically, but it looks cool!"

> Two legs are even less stable than three, yet somehow it works.

Because the legs are under the center of gravity; that's not the case for a tripod. As soon as a tripod lifts a leg, it starts to fall over.

..."The Umbrellas of Cherbourg"... yes, a great movie, and even better theme song....

There's an article about Wells on the AiG website: H.G. Wells: Darwin's Disciple and Eugenicist Extrordinaire, in which the author describes Wells as

It was a good movie, despite the obvious shortcomings. I read the book again, then I immediately recognized the book in hte movie and it made it better.

Reading the book, I was thinking Wells was an atheist from some of what he said but I wasn't exactly sure. It bugged the crap out of me "out of God's creation"..ughhh.. but until Well's book said it, how he did.. it kind of made me feel better. Well's used it more of a figure of speach type thing.

Granted, people will take it literally. "Ah, a SCIENCE fiction movie acknowdged God.. That confirms my beliefs completely now"

I don't know if Wells was an atheist, but he was certainly anti-clerical. He once said that whenever he went driving and saw a vicar, he had to fight the urge to run him down. Tim Robbins's character is actually a conflation of three characters from the book, one of whom was originally a mad parson who decides the Martians are demons (a belief that is also held by the prominent Creationist Hugh Ross, as it happens).

When I read the book, I was dissatisfied with the easy way the microbes save the day, but I've had a bit of a re-think now. It would be unsatisfying to have the aliens actually win, but the whole story is about how human resistance is futile and doomed. So the happy ending had to be arbitrary, however it was achieved, and the microbes are probably a better plot device than any alternative possibility (e.g. yodelling).

I was wondering if they were going to make the movie more pluralistic and at the end have peoples pets and relatives start to vomit and die infected with the alien microbes. If anyone could believe the outragous notion that our microbes could infect them, it obviously works both ways. Wells was ignorant, in the 50's they had the cold war and you could write it off to "our microbes are better than those commie microbes," but what excuse did Spielberg have? The microbes that they were talking about seemed to be eukaryotic protozoans from the animations.

It could be just what the IDers need. Alien invaders with similar or the same physiology and molecular biology. It would give their notions a big boost if aliens came around and they had the same genetic code and used the same amino acids. Just think if they used cAMP the same way that we do?

Some musings:

There have been two post-9/11 movies so far, Team America: World Police, and now War of the Worlds—Tim Robbins gets whacked in both of them. Coincidence?

Joke stolen from Team America: When the Discovery Institute collides with a misbehaving colleague, I'll bet they chide them by saying "Remember team, there's no 'I' in Intelligent Design".

And about the tripods, bipedal walking uses the inherent instability of an inverted pendulum, and nothing about a tripod would violate this—I've seen plenty of three-legged cats and dogs get around just fine.

Well, if Martians destroyed all microbes on their planet, it seems fairly obvious that their microbes couldn't infect Earth (being extinct)... right?

Yeah, I thought the movie was OK, but what got to me was that parts of the plot just seemed patched together. I mean, I know the film was shot really late in the game (after they had started advertising it), but this shouldn't have made for plot discontinuities. The part about the guy's son wanting to go fight, screaming "no, no, we have... to... get back... at them!" is just silly. The son not being a trained soldier, the right thing for Tom Cruise to do is punch him to the ground and tell him that he'd be an impediment to the troops. End of debate. Get your punk ass in the car, kid. And the revelation of Robbins' insanity was precipitous as well as contradictory of his previous statements. As one reviewer put it, Robbins couldn't have died too fast.

As for the God and natural selection part, I found they were both in there, just as the ending to the book, and even with much of the same wording.

> Two legs are even less stable than three, yet somehow it works. Because the legs are under the center of gravity; that's not the case for a tripod. As soon as a tripod lifts a leg, it starts to fall over.

OK. A few quick points.

War of the Worlds has a lot of hubris in it, but the reason Wells wrote the story was because he had thought about the British colonisation of Tasmania and wondered what it would be like if the British were treated the same way as the Australian aborigines by a force beyond reckoning that arrives more or less without warning. You can find this in the introduction to the book (I am indebted to Janeen Webb for pointing this out to me).

Wells was about as scientifically literate as a non-scientist could be at that time. His description of the stars wheeling in The Time Machine is just extraordinary when you consider he was writing before galaxies had been discovered.

I have not seen the film, but my feeling is that Spielberg should have set it in 1898. He could have got away with setting it in the US by adapting Howard Waldrop's marvellous novella "Night of the Cooters" about the American resistance to the Martians (in WoW some of the ships land in the US). The problem with setting it today is that our technology is too good. For this reason, the very clever Peter Jackson insisted that the King Kong remake should be set in its original era because today the story would be finished by "one Stinger missile."

In a Biped, the individual legs are *not* below the Center of Gravity. The CoG is over a line between the two feet.

If you were to do a rough approximation (by the eye) you would likely come to the conclusion that the center of mass is approximately at the waste. Not necessarily exactly, but approximately.

Oops, should be waist.

Raj: It seems I did not express myself clearly enough

What you are saying is that in humans and other the Center of Gravity is higher than the legs. I agree with that.

What I intended to say is that, when standing normally, the Center of Gravity is not vertically above either foot, but vertically above a point between them.

Look at a person from the front. The CoG is roughly behind the navel, in the middle of the body, not shifted to the right or left. This is a consequence of the bilateral body symmetry.

But there is no leg directly below the center of the body. The legs are attached to the left and right hip.

But there is no leg directly below the center of the body.

— khr

My friend has a three legged cat,believe me, tripods can get around just fine. But It looked to me as though the legs provided very little support and that the bodies were actually floating.

If I had one thing to complain about it's the scene where Tom Cruise and his kids are hiding in the basement of the farm house and a tripod is scoping the place for them, with a camera. No Infrared? No nightvsion? Maybe a motion detector or something? No, (Spielburg could have added some technological updates) And besides, If they were bothered enough to come out and investigate it personally, why not just blow up the whole house like they did to so many other buildings? I think that scene was just a lame excuse to show the aliens and the movie could have gone without it entirely.

In a Biped, the individual legs are *not* below the Center of Gravity. The CoG is over a line between the two feet.

It is not a stable position and you need a fairly sophisticated feed-back balancing system to remain upright. Actually, this is true for a normal bipedal stand, too.

a tripod that has three legs radiating from the same point

After thinking about it for a week, I've come to the realization that this war is the "perfect storm" for the One-Down-Husband. The rejected husband, who just doesn't have what it takes to be a competent mate in this society.

Imagine this disinterested father has the kids this weekend AGAIN. What is the worst possible story he could have for the One-UP Wife, come Sunday afternoon?

This is the story that Cruise dreamed when he fell asleep soon after the kids were deposited on his doorstep. It was really, really horrible.