Evolution (2001) Part III - Lightning Round!

Spoiler Level – High

The Movie – Pretty standard as far as late 90's / early 2000's comedies go. We have our brilliant yet underestimated lead. Our comic relief sidekick. Our attractive but clumsy love interest. We have out regular Joe characters who manage to have brilliant insights when the scientists are stumped. Together they fight rapidly evolving aliens from taking over Earth.

I saw this movie when it first came out over a decade ago. I didn't really love or hate it, but it definitely left an impression on me. The bad science behind the rapid evolution and the selenium poisoning is something I've never really forgotten. But re-watching it with another 10 years of post-secondary science education has brought many more issues to my attention.

The Scene – There are so many scenes with bad science in this movie that I really want to cover, but I don't want to spend the next six weeks on this. So let's just cover a half dozen of these as fast as we can:

1) A machine instantly tells the scientists that alien DNA has 10 base pairs.

2) A worm uses "mitosis" to split in two.

3) Mass keeps appearing out of nowhere.

4) The aliens evolve in response to fire.

5) A gigantic amoeba is described as the simplest form of life.

6) The aliens fail to evolve in the on aspect that would make the most sense.

The Science – 

1) This is kind of minor, but why would anyone have a machine that tells us how many types of base pairs a sample has? Everything on Earth has four bases in its DNA (excluding those unique to RNA or resulting from special modifications or accidental damage). So such a machine wouldn't even make sense to own. There is a machine called a mass spectrometer that, after careful analysis of the data, could lead you the conclusion that there are 10 bases. But there's nothing as direct as what's shown in the movie because that wouldn't be useful. This isn't even dealing with the issue of why something that isn't even supposed to be carbon-based has DNA at all.

I cannot even begin to guess what this is actually supposed to be measuring or why it would have a setting for number of base pairs. From Evolution.

2) Animals can undergo asexual reproduction. Sexual reproduction is actually favorable from an evolutionary standpoint because it allows for greater variation in the offspring, but it's still possible that the aliens would not use it. There are many potential ways the aliens could reproduce asexually, but mitosis is not one of them. Mitosis is how individual cells reproduce and it works fine for that. But try and imagine every cell in your body dividing at the same moment and somehow arranging themselves as a new individual. It's not going to work. Later species are shown reproducing asexually in a more sensible manner, but even worms are too complicated for full-body mitosis.

It Looks Human Quiz: Name another living thing that will continue to grow and divide in an airtight jar without any food. Answer coming never. From Evolution.

3) Let's stick with the worm example to tackle another recurring problem. The worms in the jar keep dividing and forming new worms as big as the originals. That means the mass is doubling, but where is the extra matter coming from? Mass in the movie keeps appearing out of nowhere. They could take some from the air but at best, there's 14 grams of nitrogen in every 22 liters of air. So that tiny jar does not have enough nitrogen to make a new worm. The matter that makes up the aliens need to come from somewhere. It's a pretty basic problem for the movie.


4) Evolving in response to fire is just really really bizarre. There's energy in fire sure. But even if the aliens could somehow use all the heat and light from fire, it would not give them the energy source for how much they grow in response to it.

It's true that many biologists are not big on math, but even I could find the error with this equation. From Evolution.

Worse than that, actually catching on fire is not going to make something more complex. Explaining fire is difficult. But basically, matter that catches on fire is going to be altered to a low energy, low complexity state. This is called oxidation. Life is the opposite of that, using energy to build simple molecules into something more complex. So I don't care what the aliens are made of. Lighting them on fire will not cause them to grow and become more complex.


5) An amoeba the size of a stadium is in no way the simplest form of life. Depending on your definition of life, a virus is the simplest form and I've already discussed why you cannot have a super-sized virus. The simplest self-sustaining life would be bacteria and archaea. An amoeba is actually a eukaryote, which, despite also being a single-celled organism, is much more complex than  bacteria or archea. So it's just wrong to call an amoeba of any size the simplest form of life. But worse than that, there's no way that giant alien will be as simple as even an amoeba. Size and complexity are linked at least to some degree. Anything as large as that alien and capable of coordinated movement is not going to be very simple. There's a reason single-celled organisms don't get that big.

While amoeba can be dangerous, death from crushing is typically not a concern. From Evolution.

6) This one really bothers me. We have aliens that evolve rapidly. Natural selection, as we discussed before, is the adaption to environmental challenges. The most serious environmental problems the aliens face is their inability to breathe in Earth's atmosphere, but it takes them weeks to do so. The aliens make their own atmosphere, but they're shown trying to move into conditions with normal Earth air from the second day. And the aliens do evolve eventually, so it's not just an impossibility given their chemistry or anything. To evolve that rapidly yet to fail to respond to such a basic selective pressure shows yet another major lack of understanding regarding evolution.

Yeah, breathing is a pretty significant part of survival of the fittest. From Evolution.

Fixing the scene –

1) I mentioned before that there's something called a mass spectrometer that could provide the right data. The results would even look similar, except instead of having a larger "DNA" peak, it would have extra peaks where the Earth sample has none. (Note: The idea of giving the aliens 10 base pairs is not a bad one. It would allow them to store more information with less material, so reproduction would be quicker.)

2) Since we're dealing with flatworms, fragmentation would be an easy way to go. But I'd prefer budding. It would be kind of cool to see the tiny clones growing off each alien. You could even show how rapid the evolution is by showing the buds always have buds of their own before they're even separated from their parent. That concept of being born pregnant, called telescoping generations, really exists in asexual species, though not with budding.

Letting the aliens have sex would also work. Sexual reproduction is not inherently slower than asexual. The aliens could exchange genetic material without taking much time to do so. (As many of us are quite aware.) But given how fast the aliens reproduce, they'd be having sex on screen constantly, which isn't great for a family friendly comedy.

3) Basic problems tend to have pretty basic solution. Just show the aliens eating something. I don't care if they're eating rocks to get the matter they need. Rocks are low in nitrogen, so the aliens may need a different elemental basis (silicon-based life is a common science fiction idea), but being nitrogen-based was never really essential for the plot and not even a great elemental choice to begin with.

4&5) 2 for 1 special. The army must do something to the aliens to accelerate their evolution to move the plot along. In response the aliens must form a more threatening lifeform. Burning the aliens into a giant amoeba is not a good solution. Oxygen has already been established to be a weakness for the aliens. So let's have the army try and flood the tunnels with an excess of oxygen. Now let's say the bigger organisms are still sensitive to oxygen, but the alien bacteria can handle it. Instead of forming one giant single-celled organism, regular-sized alien bacteria just multiply out of control to create a giant supercolony of millions of trillions of cells that devour the other aliens and everything else around it. That's the final target for the heroes to defeat with their shampoo.

6) A couple options here. One would be to make it so that oxygen is just so incompatible with the alien chemistry such that multicellular aliens are never able to evolve a tolerance to it. This would make it impossible to keep a scene where the heroes chase an alien through a mall, but that felt like padding anyway. Another option would be to just let them adapt to oxygen rapidly but confine them to the caves in another way. Say the caves begin closed off, but a seismic event or activities by the aliens opens their small cave to a larger cavern system and provides them with a way out. It means oxygen couldn't be used in the above solution 4&5, but we can just replace oxygen with acid or many other things.

Next time – I still don't think I've covered everything wrong with Evolution, but I really want to talk about something else. Let's move on to the series finale of Battlestar Galactica for some spoiler-heavy biology.