INTELLIGENT DESIGN?
“President Bush said Monday that he believed schools should discuss ‘intelligent design’ alongside evolution when teaching students about the creation of life,” reports the Associated Press.
“Proponents of intelligent design say life on Earth is too complex to have developed through evolution, implying that a higher power must have had a hand in creation.”
Bush’s recent anouncement may have Darwin going ape, but according to Darwin’s Nightmare, Hubert Sauper’s fascinating new documentary, the “higher power” having the biggest impact on the world around us is, in fact, globalization.
“Hubert Sauper’s acclaimed documentary is a compelling cautionary tale that clearly shows how, in this age of globalisation, things can easily evolve in the worst possible of unforeseen ways,” writes Time Out. “Back in the 1960s someone poured some non-native fish into Lake Victoria [in Tanzania]. The profoundly predatory Nile Perch was far bigger than its native rivals and, in killing off most species, also had a deleterious effect on the human population: farmers moved to the lake to become fishermen and satisfy the European and Russian demand for fish, which in turn caused massive economic change, sickness, poverty and, inevitably, political skulduggery.”
“The old question — Which social and political structure is the best for the world? — seems to have been answered,” writes Sauper on the film’s Web site. “Capitalism has won. The ultimate forms for future societies are ‘consumer democracies,’ which are seen as ‘civilized’ and ‘good’. In a Darwinian sense the ‘good system’ won. It won by either convincing its enemies or eliminating them.”
View the trailer for Darwin’s Nightmare on the International Film Circuit Web site.
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