Return of Heroes: the evolutionary cult show

According to Wired News, Heroes returns to US TV screens today, with the start of the third series (not sure how long it will take to reach the UK).

The Rough Guide to Evolution contains a small section devoted to cult TV shows influenced by evolution, and Heroes, alongside The Simpsons, features heavily. Here we have a whole TV series steeped in references to evolution, albeit a progressive, near-magical distortion of anything Darwinian.

During the first series, Mohinder contrasts human evolution with that of cockroaches, while Darwin permeates Mohinder ‘s relationship with his father. In the second episode, Eden tells Mohinder that she was going to give his father a first edition Origin. In a dream sequence, Charles Deveaux says that Peter Petrelli is a Darwinian, while Claude Rains later compares Peter to Darwin’s pigeons. And the show’s haunting melody is termed Natural Selection.

The evolutionary backstory continues in the second season, the opening episode of which has a science teacher--and Claire--misattributing a quote to Darwin:

It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but rather the one most adaptable to change

which in fact belongs to Clarence Darrow (it seems even Heroes nods!)

We await with interest to see whether the evolutionary themes continue in the third series.
PS. More info on the evolution links in Heroes can be found here.

A few comments from van Wyhe on the Dawkins show

I managed to make contact with John van Wyhe today and he is even less tolerant of the errors in the Dawkins show than I am!

Here is what he said, with my own hypertext links and comments added in:

Thanks Mark - your blog is great- though I made a longer list of blunders while watching! (You can use this if you want) 

I was very disappointed with the Darwin documentary. There are a lot of people who spend their lives studying the man and yet here we get Dawkins' second-hand gloss with only one expert, Randal Keynes, briefly on screen.

First of all, the major theme was not "Who was Charles Darwin and how did he figure out how life works"? Instead, it was “Darwin is better than religious explanations”.

Dawkins Claim: Darwin wanted to be a priest instead of his family's desire he be a physician.

In fact, it was his family's idea he become a clergyman.

Dawkins Claim: His family connections got him the Beagle voyage offer.

It was his Cambridge connections, not his family connections.

 [specifically Henslow]

Dawkins Claim: Darwin was one of the first to recognized that fossils were the remains of extinct organisms!

Wrong by centuries!

[centuries is a bit strong: my understanding is that Cuvier was the first to establish this in the 1790s, more than forty years before Darwin's Beagle voyage, but the recognition that fossils were the remains of once-living but not necessarily extinct, organisms goes back to Steno, over a century and a half before Darwin, so Darwin is far from the first]

Dawkins Claim: Darwin was one of the first to see that the world was older than 6000 years! 

Again, wrong by centuries. In fact many discoveries are attributed to Darwin rather than to Richard Owen, Lyell and the entire scientific community of his day and the preceding generations. This Darwin lives in a vacuum!

Dawkins Claim: He thought his theory would be ‘upsetting’ so he therefore hesitated in publishing it.

Nonsense!

The people on your blog who think they disagree with me and say 'it was lots of factors' have obviously not read my article! If you cite this copy people can read it for free:

http://darwin-online.org.uk/people/van_Wyhe_2007_Mind_the_gap_did_Darwin_avoid_publishing_his_theory.pdf

 All best, John -- Dr John van Wyhe

Director The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online University of Cambridge CRASSH, 17 Mill Lane, Cambridge, CB2 1RX http://darwin-online.org.uk/ Fax: 01223 (7)65276

Bye-Fellow Christ's College, Cambridge