Via PZ, a blog on biology and science fiction is griping that biology gets no respect, and links to a Jack Cohen article complaining that authors and filmmakers don’t take biology seriously I was particularly struck by this bit:
Authors, film producers and directors, special-effects teams go to physicists, especially astrophysicists, to check that their worlds are workable, credible; they go to astronomers to check how far from their sun a planet should be, and so on. They even go to chemists to check atmospheres, rocket fuels, pheromones (apparently they’re not biology….), even the materials that future everyday clothes (not only spacesuits) will be made of. They do go to self-styled “astrobiologists”, who are usually astronomers or astrophysicists who remember some Biology 1.01 (or think they could if pressed). Between them they invent reptiloid “aliens” (who are cold-blooded enough to do all those dastardly things no warm-blooded American male could do…), feline aliens (who have the psychology of the household cat writ large, especially by more mature female authors…), dinosaur “aliens”…. Or giant ants. Or were they mut-ants, I don’t remember (but how many screen mutations have you seen that change the recipient, not its progeny?). Or a vast array of “alien” human actors with a bit of wax, as easy on the Special Effects Dept as the Pure Energy aliens, or the Aliens on mid-day TV shows who magic things out of the air and see through clothing (do their eyes emit or receive X-rays?), and which otherwise free the writers from having to produce a consistent plot. Or Vulcans who can produce viable offspring with humans (when even our cousins the fish can’t – mermaids are even less breedable than Spock). These people know that they don’t know about physics, or astronomy, or chemistry. Those disciplines are real science. So they get help. But the biology seems so ‘obvious’ to them … and they don’t realise that it feels just the same to be sure and wrong as sure and right! Of course, those of us that agree biologists can see that all those anthropomorphs can’t be alien, they’re vertebrate mammals and must share our ancestry here on Earth. They can’t see that ET can’t be e-t, that the ‘Alien’ doesn’t work – except in its primary purpose, scaring the living daylights out of the audience with the bursting-out-of-chest routine (how can a parasite pre-adapt to immune-responses, and not being felt in the chest when it’s bigger than your heart?). Biology questions don’t seem professional to the people who design these scenarios; it’s like folk psychology or philosophy – everyone has “a right to” an opinion.
It’s striking, because I have to wonder what films, exactly, he’s talking about. Most of the SF movies I see are lucky if they can get Newton’s Laws right, let alone any of the finer points of astrophysics. There is, in fact, an entire site devoted to Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics, which points out that even movies that aren’t SF get some astonishingly basic things completely wrong.
I’m not going to attempt to claim that the movies actually do a decent job with biology– that’d be crazy. The point is, they do a lousy job with everything science-related. Biologists are just more offended about bad biology than physicists. Cohen thinks that they do a better job with physics than biology because he knows more about biology than physics, but looked at objectively, their handling of both biology and physics sucks.
In the end, I’m not all that upset about the bad science in the movies– the first time I linked the Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics site, I called them humorless dorks— because they’re generally not about science. Movie aliens look like humans with latex masks and alien planets look like California because it’s easier to do things that way, and the primary concern is about the story, not the science, and I’m OK with that.