io9 explores SciFi's most interesting explanations:
If Ben Stein really wants to convince us all that evolution is a crock, he doesn't need to make a documentary and play semantic games with Richard Dawkins. He just has to sit us down and make us watch this episode of Star Trek: Voyager, where traveling at super-warp speed causes Janeway and Paris to super-evolve into lizards (and make lizard babies.) But it's not just Voyager — science fiction provides a ton of evolution theories that make intelligent design seem downright sensible.
...4. Your children will inherit your body-mods. Maybe the earliest evolutionary theorist was Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829) who believed in the idea of "soft inheritance," where you pass on your acquired characteristics to your kids. If your body adapts to circumstances during your life — for example, if a particular organ gets smaller because you use it less — then your children will inherit it. (That organ will be smaller in your kids.) In fact, only genetic changes are passed on. But that doesn't stop science fiction from presenting changes to a creature's body, or non-genetic adaptations that you make in the course of your life, as being heritable. (Lamarck's ideas are sometimes mischaracterized as, "if you lose a leg, you'll have one-legged children," but he wasn't that silly.) In David Cronenberg's 1979 classic The Brood, a cutting-edge psychotherapy causes patients to manifest their darkest emotions in their own bodies — and one transformed woman gives birth to monster children that she can control telepathically.
I was always a huge fan of Mystery Science Theater 3000. Still am. Thank Jeebus for Blockbuster Online.
For those of you who have no idea what I'm talking about, and therefore hate America, here's a taste:
io9 reports:
If you've been missing Mystery Science Theater 3000 ever since it went off the air, you're in luck. Longtime fans of the movie-riffing series know that its original star Joel Hodgson left the show in 1993, when it was at the height of popularity. Mike Nelson, the head writer for the series, took over and it lasted another six years before finally going off the air in 1999. Almost ten years later, Joel and most of the original crew including Trace Beaulieu (Crow), J. Elvis Weinstein (Tom Servo), Frank Conniff (TV's Frank) and Mary Jo Pehl (Pearl Forrester) have returned in the form of Cinematic Titanic, and it's awesome.
The show doesn't air online or on any channel (yet), but you can order the newly available pilot episode The Oozing Skull from their website. The gang doesn't build gizmos or robots this time (unfortunately), but they do appear onscreen in silhouette and riff on movies. It's great just to hear everyone together again, even if we do miss terribly the characters of Tom Servo, Crow, and the Satellite of Love.
Yesterday in Israel, a bomb disposal robot inspected the scene of a suicide bombing at a shopping mall in the town of Dimona. The bot is remote controlled, and used an articulated arm to remove the jacket of the alleged bomber to be sure he doesn't have more explosives on his body. Want to see what else the robot does as it finishes its inspection of the area?
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