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09/20/2005: Thought for the Day:
It has been amusing to watch the radical right/anti-evolution/family-values crowd laud the subjects of March of the Penguins for their commitment to their mates and as evidence of intelligent design. If anything, the film seemed to me to reinforce what we know of natural selection. Darwin would have thrilled to it. These strange, complex, grueling rituals of penguin mating and procreation in the Antarctic have obviously evolved to keep this flock alive in "the harshest place on Earth."
In one (upsetting) scene, the adult penguins do nothing as a group of young'uns is attacked by a predator. One succumbs. Family values? The only way you can account for this chilling indifference is the heartlessness of evolution: You give them one—the one that can't get away—and the hawks leave the rest alone for the time being. Monogamy? The narration makes the point that they are serially monogamous: They change partners after each breeding cycle. Some penguins, we have recently learned, are queer—and this with no exposure to our debased Hollywood-liberal culture.
These people really are deluded, aren't they? They'll twist anything to suit their ends and then count on an audience that doesn't think critically—an audience that I should think is far easier to manipulate than penguins...
--David Edelstein
Len on 09.20.05 @ 05:59 AM CST
