Excess demands to be read…

May 28, 2008 at 3:11 pm · Filed under evolution, Uncategorized and tagged: Dawkins, evolution

When my grad student Jon Cluck alerted me to the appearance of this video on YouTube a month or so ago, it was almost enough to start me blogging then and there. But deferral is my habit: some other time…

But now that I’m done deferring it deserves some pride of place, so watch it now if you haven’t already — it’s had quite the viral existence:

 

If origin and intent is your thing, then my best guess is that it was created under the auspices of the producers responsible for Expelled, the film which attempts to give intelligent design a good name and face.  But this video exceeds any origin or intent it had.  Just read any of the comments on YouTube, or on PZ Myers’s Pharyngula blog discussing this, or on RichardDawkins.net and it’s clear that origin and intent are profoundly limiting frameworks: some scientists love it, some hate it, some think its pro-ID, some pro-Darwin, pro-science, antiscience, bad rap, great rap, brilliant, stupid, and pretty much everything in in between and outside these tags.  It’s an excess, a riotously rich ecosystem of images and words that demands to be read, and read again.  And each reading, as a creative act, only adds to the excess.  The video is a tangled bank — a formation Darwin was hip to…

Comments (1)