tv

This Sunday evening, at 9:00 EDT/ 8:00 CDT, the National Geographic Channel will show "The Neanderthal Code" in the US. I appear in this film, and you can see some clips already at the documentary's website.

The film focuses on the current genomic DNA recovery from Neandertals; many of the major players in the DNA sequencing effort appear. My research is covered, as well as other contemporary approaches to Neandertal biology and behavior. It's not complete, but it's a good documentary and at 2 hours, it's double the length of most.

Of course, the film shows a lot of people running around in Neandertal makeup, which I usually don't like -- but this time, they dress one in modern clothes and put him on the subway to see what happens. Was Carleton Coon right? Will people notice something odd? Tune in and see!

"Hmmm....MANscaping...."

UPDATE (2008/09/20): Zach Zorich of Archaeology gives it a positive review:

This program covers a vast amount of science, both old and new, and serves as a thorough and entertaining summary of the latest interpretations and data on our species's closest fossilized relatives. The show addresses several important questions: Did Neanderthal's make art? Were they tougher than professional bull-riders? Did they have religion? If so, were they such a bunch of Puritans that they wouldn't mate with the Homo sapiens who invaded their territory in Europe roughly 40,000 years ago?

Puritans. Hmm....that gives me an idea for a picture...

Meanwhile, several e-mailers have noticed this:

Now, I'm sure it was unintentional, but this cracked me up: as the narrator announces "Today, it’s obvious who dominates the planet" and pauses, the video cues to a shot of John standing in the middle of Times Square(?), looking straight into the camera!

Ahhh, yes. We've been laughing about that one for a few weeks!

Am I the only one who noticed that the pictures of an "uncontacted" tribe in the Amazon were released the same week as the Indiana Jones movie, in which an uncontacted Amazonian tribe is a major plot point?

Anthropologists have known about the group for some 20 years but released the images now to call attention to fast-encroaching development near the Indians' home in the dense jungles near Peru.

OK, so I get it. It's all an allegory. The "city of gold" represents the wealth of the untrammeled forest. And the Soviets are the fast-encroaching developers. And the indigenous people are ... the indigenous people!

And Indiana Jones is... um... the grave-robbing anthropologist who does nothing for the natives and leaves the forest a despoiled wasteland?

Oh well.

I like Culture Matters' take:

While I certainly agree that small pockets of cultural diversity should not be aggressively assimilated, I feel a little queasy that we have to sell the drive for cultural autonomy and respect for foraging peoples with the whole 'never seen a white man' drivel. The term 'uncontacted' is part of the problem; 'isolated' would be better, as these groups have seldom 'never seen a white man.' They usually have developed a habit of reacting hostilely when they do, perhaps suggesting that it's not so much lack of contact, but certain kinds of contact that they have experienced.

The FUNAI website, for example, is very clear that four isolated groups living in the region in which the aerial photographs were taken in late April and early May have been observed for twenty years, and the FUNAI site focuses on the news that the groups appear to be reasonably healthy (which is news). They put the photographs up with the statement that they are for 'cultural dissemination'...

"Cultural dissemination" along with international movie releases? Maybe we'll get a release about Roswell too?

In between. Much more fun while watching than Temple of Doom -- mainly due to the lack of any annoyances as great as Kate Capshaw or Spielberg's mid-80's use of kids. Why didn't they bring Karen Allen back sooner?

On the other hand, many, many more logical holes than Last Crusade, many fewer fun scenes, and too many superhuman feats of endurance. And a retread of Spielberg's late-80's use of splattering goop. And did I mention the logical holes?

And a new annoyance: bad CGI. Did we really need animated prairie dogs?

By the way, that kid in the library to whom Indy gives a V. Gordon Childe reference was Tom Hanks' and Rita Wilson's son Chet Hanks.

Yes, I'm always following the latest entertainment news in The Hollywood Reporter. Today I learn that Lisa Kudrow is going to produce a new reality show that gives celebrities encounters with their ancestors:

The network has ordered a genealogy reality series called "Who Do You Think You Are" from U.K. production house Wall to Wall (PBS' "Frontier House") in association with Lisa Kudrow and Dan Bucatinsky's Is or Isn't Entertainment.

The one-hour series is based on the hit British series where stars are shown the oft-surprising details of their ancestors' lives. In the U.K. version, the uncovered backstories included tales of bigamy, wartime heroism and, in one case, attempted murder. Celebrity participants often are brought to tears as they learn about their relatives' hardships.

The British version has a Wikipedia page, with quite a list of (British) celebrities -- Stephen Fry, Nigella Lawson, David Tennant....OOH OOH, David Dickinson!

Summaries of the episodes are available at the program's website, and they seem pretty interesting. They use traditional geneaological research with documentary records, not really any genetics that I've noticed -- no "African-American Lives"-like gene tracing. What an interesting story David Dickinson has.

Well, so I think an American version might have potential, but I'd be even more interested in having BBC America show the originals!

UPDATE (2008/03/13): A reader reports that the Canadian version of the show has used some DNA testing in its research:

Before heading to the New Brunswick archives to investigate the Gosmans further, [opera singer] Measha [Brueggergosman] and her brother Neville decide to send their DNA for analysis. Testing their DNA can provide information about their ancestors’ distant ethnic background. Scientists compare genetic markers on chromosomes to see if they match up with samples compiled in a worldwide data bank.

This could be a lot of fun, depending on who the celebrities are.

The movie, 10,000 B.C., blew away the competition last weekend, with an estimated $35.7 million in US box office receipts.

I think it is a disaster movie of epic scale -- at least, from the point of view of anthropology!

My favorite quote from a reviewer comes from Peter Canavese's "Groucho Reviews":

It was actually raconteur HL Mencken who said, "No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public," but it was P.T. Barnum who lived it, putting over entertaining hoaxes on an eager public. Barnum's modern-day disciple is Roland Emmerich, specialist in the epic of stupidity. For an encore to the global-warming action picture The Day After Tomorrow (in which Dennis Quaid walks -- through a blizzard -- from Washington D.C. to Manhattan), our favorite Teutonic huckster presumes that prehistory means that anything narrative goes: hey, who can prove him wrong?

As narrator Omar Sharif intones at picture's outset, "Only time can teach us what is truth and what is legend." See? If Omar Sharif said it, it must be true!

Oh, that hits a little close to home -- considering the extent to which TV documentaries about archaeology expect us to believe Alec Baldwin's or Liev Schreiber's authoritative-sounding voices. Hey, if they can sell us cars, they can sell us science, right?

But for a little bit lighter view of the movie's reception, we can turn to the movie's IMDB forum (I credit Simon Greenhill with this idea). Or, maybe it makes for an even more depressing picture; I guess it depends on your point of view.

For instance, we have this criticism:

Next is the fact that they did not speak English back then. I am aware that they could have grunted throughout the movie(i.e. Quest for Fire) but common, with the movie goers to day you can barely have a movie that doesn't have explosions or boobs in it do good. It is just unrealistic for the times.

Well, naturally there is an answer for everything:

Plus, consider this: its still EARTH and their descentants several dozen centuries later will be speaking English so it's way less of a stretch than everyone speaking English in STAR WARS which is ANOTHER GALAXY and I don't see the English dissers here trolling the STAR WARS sites.

Point taken. Those who don't question mystical midichlorians are poorly placed to object to anachronistic pyramids.

Of course, any film dealing with prehistoric life may bring out a certain kind of critic. We all know the type:

The correct term is 10,000 BP, before present. I find the term BC, before Christ, extremely offensive. I am an atheist and I do not want to feel obliged to use all this Christian terminology that is being pushed on me 24/7.

Or maybe that wasn't the type of critic you were expecting? Before you head off to set that writer straight, rest assured that a wide array of well-meaning alumni of undergraduate science courses are ahead of you, brimming with variably-accurate news about radiocarbon chronologies.

One might, perhaps, do better, but this forum is not a place for the sane to wander. Consider one hypothesis about the origins of the movie's story:

The idea was that there were these whitish people who both Asian people and white people were related to. In India it's considered that these people founded India as we know it. Anyway, these people were like the elves from The Lord of The Rings. They were vegetarians and even had an organ which allowed a type of psychic communication. The idea of being "psychic" cropped up heavily when these stories were popular in the 1800s, and still it continues today.

White people lost these powers, according to the story, when they mated with people from the mideast. That's because scientists, and this is true, found hybrid Jewish Neanderthal bodies in the mideast. It was concluded that the human race got "devolved" by mixing with the animal people who once lived on Earth.

I'm going to start putting "and this is true" randomly into my blog posts. It will really increase my links from kooks.

Could it get worse? Of course it could: we just need some "anthropologists" to show up and start educating people! Like this:

All human lineages appear to converge on Africa in the distant past. However, 12,000 years ago there were varied races living in widely distributed civilizations all over the world. This film takes place either in Europe or North America (I don't know which), where there would at that time have been no negroids (although in N. America there also would've been no caucasoids).

Or, OOH OOH, this!

Your spoken and stated strident supposition that there totally no "Caucasoids" in North America over 10,000 B.C. is completely in-correct. Are you at all aware of the conversed "Clovis" and supposedly stated "Solutrian" connection? The interest on the internet in this intriguing interelationship is increasing immeasurably since the National Geographic Channel's documentary demonstratably detailing and declaring that the Mammoths were massacred or a mass extinction event by a major mile wide meteor about 10 millenia ago. So, it surely seems the Cacusoids were killed along with the mammoths and the majority of mega-fauna in most of N. America at about 9,700 B.C., basically.

Check out the alliteration there! I can't wait until I get demonstrably detailed and declared -- AND THIS IS TRUE! -- by a major mile wide meteor!

Later, a "history major" shows up to bring sanity to the place:

Any movie about this time period is going to have to be almost completely made up because we know almost nothing about it. Understand? If you think you know something about that time period, (and please, grow up, I'm only talking about cultural history here ok? Not geology, or ancient animals. If you're a geology or ancient animal freak...i don't know what to tell you. Movies in general probably aren't for you, Ok?)...you don't.

Understand? If you know when sabretooths and mammoths ruled the earth, then maybe movies in general aren't for you.

I have to say, I'm increasingly feeling that way....

But there's always hope. Here's another commenter's assessment of the movie:

So boring a caveman could do it.

What a great concept for a column by Virginia Postrel: the way that TV is changing the image of the scientist. Her opening: a 1957 survey of images about scientists carried out by Margaret Mead:

The number of ways in which the image of the scientist contains extremes which appear to be contradictory -- too much contact with money or too little; being bald or bearded; confined to work indoors, or traveling far away; talking all the time in a boring way, or never talking at all -- all represent deviations from the accepted way of life, from being a normal friendly human being, who lives like other people and gets along with other people.

This is a clever leaping-off point to write about Gil Grissom and Charlie Epps, the two TV scientists who most put the humanity back into the Vulcan-like image of the scientist.

Rather than releasing the Monsters of the Id, science provides a bulwark against them. "You spend your life uncovering what goes on beneath the surface of civility and acceptable behavior," the insightful dominatrix Lady Heather tells Grissom in the first of her recurring appearances, "so it's a release for you to indulge in something like high tea, where it seems, if only for a moment, the world really is civilized." People don't need science or advanced technology to do terrible things to each other.

Well, most scientists don't keep a dominatrix around their lab for tea, but this is still a nice twist on the old Frankenstein theme. In her blog post about the article, Postrel points to Carl Zimmer's continuing scientific tattoo series as an object lesson in the new scientific chic.

I'm watching mid-day kid-friendly animal programming, when I realize a central fact of television reality: Jeff Corwin is a freak. Not just any kind of freak. A climbing-up-on-Indian-rooftops-with-urban-monkeys kind of freak. A "Hey lady, that monkey just stole your jogging shorts!" kind of freak.

LUCY: "I don't want this kind of show. I don't want it! I don't want it! I don't want this kind! I don't want this kind!"

DADDY: "Really, you don't want this show?"

LUCY: "I want a cartoon."

DADDY: "Believe me, that's what you're watching."

I've flipped to a Nova, titled "Bone Diggers," about Australian paleontology. They're interviewing Australian paleontologist John Long, formerly of the Western Australian Musuem -- now at Museum Victoria -- and showing a skeleton of "an animal that has puzzled paleontologists for a hundred years."

They go out on the Nullarbor Plain, which has "thousands" of deep-shaft caves. They got some e-mail from some spelunkers showing a spectacular skeleton, and have come to excavate and survey what else is there. Apparently, there is a huge threat of fossil poaching from these caves.

I really like this Nova -- it doesn't have any of the trumped-up controversy of most paleontology docs, and the narration is fairly minimal. There is a lot of opportunity for Long to explain things in his own words. And all the time is spent following the paleontologists -- you get a view of how they set up their camp, how they practice with rockclimbing gear, and the efforts they take to minimize the chance that poachers will track them to the cave. And you see them preparing the fossils: a half-million year old complete skeleton of Thylacoleo, eight new species of fossil kangaroos, and many other skeletons.

It's an ideal kind of site for filming, because the paleontologists just had to walk through the cave and find things on the surface. So it's not characteristic of the high failure-rate and large-scale digging out backdirt of many paleontological sites. But the site gives the opportunity to see the scientists reflecting on what they are finding, and several instances where the paleontologists are turning over bones and suddenly recognize that the bones represent a new species. So that's pretty cool.

And you see them don protective suits to take bone samples for DNA and radiometric dating. They have the idea that the bones may be among the most recent found of the Australian megafauna, but they turn out to be several hundred thousand years old. Which is quite stunning, since the bones look like they were placed in the cave very recently. It's amazing to imagine such a pristine environment, without dust or significant moisture, for a half million years.

Then, a bit over halfway through, they return to the museum and you see comparative work, with not only Long but also Rod Wells describing the biology of Thylacoleo. After this follows several sequences of research on the fossil, including a CT scan, a computer reconstruction of the endocast, laser scanning and virtual reconstruction to assess locomotor characteristics, an anatomical artist drawing a fleshed-out reconstruction and then sculpting one; the sculpture being laser-scanned, and finally animated. And then you see the skeleton on exhibit in the museum.

They find out interesting things; like the large clawed front paws for bringing down animals; the specialized, kangaroo-like chevron bones in the tail that indicate the Thylacoleo could take on an upright, tripod stance; and the flat-footed, bear-like walking style. I usually hate animated 3-d reconstructions of things, but in this case, the animal is so much a mixture of features from living models, that it seems really uncanny to have them put all together. So the model conveys a lot of information that can't be absorbed easily otherwise.

This is a really nice presentation of what paleontology is about -- from beginning to end showing people working on finding, preserving, and interpreting the fossils. Only in the last ten minutes does the show divert to other scientists musing on why the Australian megafauna disappeared; that's interesting and all, but I'm glad the show didn't focus on that problem. Because the Thylacoleo itself is interesting enough.

I really like Anthony Bourdain's "No Reservations" show -- the schtick is that he's a freewheeling chef-with-attitude who travels around the world seeing unusual sights and eating unusual meals. What makes it entertaining is Anthony's attitude: deep down, he appreciates the basic food of other cultures as an element of human experience and the fundamental building blocks of high cuisine; but he finds an incredible array of creepy, questionable, or plain disgusting-looking meals.

So, he ends up eating raw seal meat with Inuit people in Quebec, incredibly old pickled things in Vietnam, and bushmeat in Ghana. Mind you, he also eats a broad variety of really high-class foods -- my favorite from last season was his meal at El Bulli in Spain with chef Ferran Adria -- you can't get any more refined than that! The thing is the juxtaposition; eat what the poor people eat, eat what the rich people eat, look for the connections.

My favorite moment so far this year, I saw last week -- his visit to a bush farm in Namibia, where some local people fed him, well, read the description:

Where

Bushmen Farmland, Arnold Huber

What

Tony joined a hunt, took a tour and ate authentic bushmen dishes, including an ostrich-egg omelette, warthog brains/rectum/meat, tree beetles and Namibian truffles.

He really liked the tree beetles.

Bizarrely, I'm now listening to the voice of Drew Carey telling me about Neanderthals. It's on Prehistoric Planet, which is one of the Discovery Kids shows. This particular Neanderthal, who looks like an outtake from "Walking with Cavemen," is being charged by a wooly rhinoceros.

Yeaoww! The rhino just gored him!

Oh, yep, they are the Neanderthals from "Walking with Cavemen." "Prehistoric Planet" is a repackaged version with new narration for kids.

Now a bunch of mammoths are just walking along the edge of a very high cliff. This seems like a critical error of mammoth judgement.

And the Neanderthals are waiting with blazing firebrands.

It's risky getting right up in your prey's face like this. Especially when your prey has tusks!

It's an interestingly jumbled ending, with Neandertals going extinct because "they can't adapt to their changing world," the mammoths going extinct -- 19,000 years later -- because it gets too warm for them, and Cro-Magnons having a happy ending as they become ... us! All temperature, no killing spree. Don't you see, you just have to be able to change!

Well, it didn't keep Goodwin's attention, but then he's only two.

Wow, "Planet Earth" tonight had nightime footage of lions taking down an elephant. It was one of those lone young males, and it had thirty lions running it down, with multiple lions jumping up on its back. I wrote about this last year; it's fascinating to see it in action.

They didn't catch the final takedown on film, but they had the gratuitous hungry lions eating the elephant shot.

It's the "Great Plains" episode; which actually had very little about the real Great Plains -- that is, the part of the American West where I'm from.

I'm watching the Discovery Channel's new "Planet Earth" miniseries -- though not in primetime but in rebroadcast. The series seem like a way to sell people HD televisions, and I have to say they're gorgeous. In the second episode there is a long segment showing geladas in highland Ethiopia, moving in groups of several hundred.

The series includes many long shots from the air, which allows them to show the movement of herds (or troops) from a longer perspective that shows their dynamics. In the first episode, this was used to great effect showing the hunting tactics of wolves and Cape dogs.

Also in the first, there was footage of baboons wading bipedally into the Okavango Delta.

This has got to have more potential than that movie, Homo erectus:

March 3, 2007 -- ABC is turning the Geico caveman ads into a half-hour sitcom.

"Cavemen" will revolve around three pre-historic men who must battle prejudice as they attempt to live as normal thirtysomethings in modern Atlanta.

Various smart-aleck remarks:

In their defamation lawsuit, the cavemen retain Denny Crane.

BRUNO TONIOLI: "That tango WAS A LATIN PLEISTOCENE DREAM!"

I can't wait to see how they react to typing 4,8, 15, 16, 23, 42 again and again...

IZZIE: (fighting back tears) "We tried, but there just aren't any matching donors for a new caveman heart..."

Next week, in a touching episode of Ugly Betty...

Three words: Caveman Wife Swap...

Meanwhile, further down in the story:

Few TV shows have come out of the commercial sphere, but it's not without precedence: The 2002 CBS comedy "Baby Bob" revolved around a talking baby character that was first seen in a series of dot.com ads.

I've got to figure it's a bad thing if your Variety story mentions the words, "Baby Bob".

I suppose it's uniquely anthronerdy to be irritated by the fake skull props on Survivor. But they're like biker skulls with sutures in the wrong places!

And they've given them a "flint" right away this time. That irritates me every time, because it is really one of these magnesium bars, where you shave off some and make some sparks and it lights up to 5000° (compare and contrast with a real flint and steel here).

Of course, when that tiebreaker last season had two people trying to start a fire with these things for over an hour and a half, I was rolling!

I always tell my students that Survivor is the best show to watch for anthropological insights. If you want to see how hard it is to make Machiavellian intelligence work, this is the one to watch!

I love how nobody wanted to pick Ms. Smartypants, and she got sent to Exile Island. And, oh no! The immunity idol is a fake skull, with baseball-like fake stitches and a spangle of fake ulnae!

I like my science-show narrators disembodied. I especially like it if they sound like Liev Schreiber. Alec Baldwin, I don't mind, although I always feel like next he's going to tell me about the caterpillar drive.

So all three of the new pilots that PBS aired this month as candidates for the "new" science show basically turned me off. Two of them -- the Wired and Science Investigators shows -- are definitely tuned for a younger, hipper demographic. At least, a younger hipper demographic that wants to see young pseudoreporters wandering clumsily through labs, ponds, and other exotic locales. I'm not convinced there's any space between "young and hip" and "dorky" in the science-show universe.

The two of them beat 22nd Century pretty easily. Get this description from Scientific American's Nikhil Swaminathan:

Robinson co-hosts this show with a reincarnation of Aldous Huxley--I kid you not; though it's an actor playing the role, obviously--who's job it is "to remind us that all progress is not a step forward," and Orlanda Bell, an astral projection (half human, half machine), who presumably the show's producers have created to spread what will likely turn out to be half truths from the future. ("Almost all deadly diseases have been eradicated," being one of the first phrases out of her mouth.) Basically, it's like the dad from Punky Brewster bickering with a hologram that could have looked like anyone--so, obviously they chose Designing Women's Annie Potts--over whether we're all going to grow up to be cyborgs.

Yes it is that bad. It's like over-the-top Crossing Jordan bad. Maybe they should have had a seance and brought back Edgar Cayce instead.

I will say that Science Investigators probably had the best chance for my attention, since they went to 454 Life Sciences to talk about Neandertal DNA. But they definitely lost it when their discussion ran to how easy it would be to clone a Neandertal, if only it weren't so ethically wrong. As if!

Anyway, if you want to see more about the shows, Nikhil Swaminathan of Scientific American has been blogging them (that link goes to the last installment, which links to the other two). I basically have the same opinion, that Wired had the most potential of the bunch.

But if it were me, I would just kill this and ScienceNOW! and triple the amount of Nova. Or make more Scientific American Frontiers -- somehow that show makes the magazine format with short stories work in a way that these clunkers didn't manage. What's more, Alan Alda manages to be hip without being dorky.

Last year, the show had several anthro-related episodes, but this year it has been mostly network theory and the like. Until last night, when Sewall Wright was mentioned by name!

That's right, folks. US network drama. Friday night. Sewall Wright.

Sweeeeeeeet!

Why Sewall Wright? Well, our intrepid mathematician, Charlie, had to calculate the inbreeding coefficient for a monomaniacal polygamist cult leader. His pedigree for five generations or so was sewn into a quilt, and neither Charlie nor his attractive mathematician girlfriend knew what the symbols represented -- until Charlie's department chair, played by Kathy Najimy, for goodness sake, (who happened to be in Charlie's house because she is getting it on with Charlie's dad -- you know, Judd Hirsch -- recognized the pedigree symbols from cattle breeding!

Is this a great show, or what?

Of course, they followed that moment with some genetic nonsense about how the cult leader couldn't conceive with any of his highly related wives, so he had to have a particular unrelated female to mate with. I say, "nonsense," mainly because it was irrelevant to the plot, and didn't really convey a correct understanding of "recessive" alleles.

But how much can I ask for, really? Especially when I happened to be reading Sewall Wright at that very moment!

There has been quite a bit of discussion about how Mel Gibson's film Apocalypto fits or doesn't fit certain good or bad cultural stereotypes. Such as:

• He employed Maya actors (good).
• He shot a fictional mural of a beheading (bad).
• He used the Maya language (good).
• He exploited violent colonialist stereotypes (bad).

When I read this review of the movie, a sentence struck me:

It is not an obsessive opera like Mr. Herzog's "Aguirre: The Wrath of God," but rather a pop period epic in the manner of "Gladiator" or "Braveheart," and as such less interested in historical or cultural authenticity than in imposing an accessible scheme on a faraway time and place.

Haven't you noticed that Apocalypto is basically a novelization of the Maya part of Jared Diamond's Collapse?

Here's the plot outline of the movie from IMDB:

As the Maya kingdom faces its decline, the rulers insist the key to prosperity is to build more temples and offer human sacrifices. Jaguar Paw (Rudy Youngblood), a young man chosen for sacrifice, flees the kingdom to avoid his fate.

If you want to read a short version of Diamond's claims about the Maya, you can find them in this online version of Diamond's Harper's magazine article from 2003:

Bringing matters to a head was a drought that, although not the first one the Maya had been through, was the most severe. At the time of previous droughts, there were still uninhabited parts of the Maya landscape, and people in a drought area or dust bowl could save themselves by moving to another site. By the time of the Classic collapse, however, there was no useful unoccupied land in the vicinity on which to begin anew, and the whole population could not be accommodated in the few areas that continued to have reliable water supplies.

The final strand is political. Why did the kings and nobles not recognize and solve these problems? A major reason was that their attention was evidently focused on the short-term concerns of enriching themselves, waging wars, erecting monuments, competing with one another, and extracting enough food from the peasants to support all those activities. Like most leaders throughout human history, the Maya kings and nobles did not have the leisure to focus on long-term problems, insofar as they perceived them.

Diamond pushes this simplified version of Maya history as an allegory for U.S. ecological hubris.

Gibson apparently has taken the same tale and made it -- like his other movies -- into a morality play about individual liberty and defense of family. He's less into ecological hubris, and more into the dangers of unrestrained power. That's probably a good idea, since films about ecological hubris are generally very dull.

On the other hand, films about abuse of power generally paint with a very broad brush. And when the premise (as in Collapse) is that the abusive power is used stupidly, the morality play can reach absurd proportions.

In any event, if you're looking for the social zeitgeist behind this Apocalypto phenomenon, it would seem to derive from these widespread assumptions about Maya ecology and political structures that Diamond has helped to popularize. Collapse itself already simplifies vastly to make his point about ecologies and social regulation. The entire book is a case of "imposing an accessible scheme on a faraway time and place."

Gibson has certainly simplified far more to make the situation dramatic. But clearly the two are tied together, and plausibly the film wouldn't have its form without the book.

The Times had this article the other day discussing whether TV is good for preschool-age kids. It's not all that interesting, but this bit near the end caught my attention:

Developmental psychologists say the Vanderbilt research offers an intriguing clue to a phenomenon called the "video deficit." Toddlers who have no trouble understanding a task demonstrated in real life often stumble when the same task is shown onscreen. They need repeated viewings to figure it out. This deficit got its name in a 2005 article by Daniel R. Anderson and Tiffany A. Pempek, psychologists at the University of Massachusetts, who reviewed literature on young children and television.

...

But psychologists still want to get to the bottom of what might explain the difference. Is it the two-dimensionality of the screen? Do young children have some innate difficulty in remembering information transmitted as symbols?

The paper linked in an article is a broad review of early childhood TV viewing, and isn't all that helpful, although it gives about 2 pages of review on the topic. Interestingly, the "video deficit" includes aspects of language learning:

A third line of research is concerned with language learning. Children 2 years and older can clearly learn vocabulary from television (Naigles & Kako,1993; Rice, Huston, Truglio, & Wright, 1990;Rice & Woodsmall, 1988). Nevertheless, when comparisons are made between video and equivalent live conditions in children younger than 2 1/2years, the results suggest a video deficit. Grela, Lin,
and Krcmar (2003) tried to teach object labels either live, in an equivalent video, or in a version of Teletubbies that used the labels. They found better learning in the live as compared to video conditions. Learning from video by children near their 2nd birthday was substantially better than that by younger children.

Infants are able to perceive many phonetic contrasts that are not found in their native language; this ability is lost by about 12 months of age if infants are not exposed to other languages. Kuhl, Tsao, and Liu (2003) exposed American infants to contrasts found in Mandarin. One group of infants was exposed to live speakers of Mandarin for about 5 hours during 12 sessions between 9 and 10 months of age. Other groups were exposed to equivalent audiovisual or audio-only DVDs. The infants exposed to live speakers did not experience the loss of ability to perceive Mandarin contrasts. Infants exposed to the DVD stimuli, however, showed the same loss as infants exposed to no Mandarin at all. Again, this research indicates a profound video (and audio) deficit (Anderson and Pempek 2005:513).

This paper by Georgene Troseth and colleagues delves into the problem:

Young Children's Use of Video as a Source of Socially Relevant Information

Although prior research clearly shows that toddlers have difficulty learning from video, the basis for their difficulty is unknown. In the 2 current experiments, the effect of social feedback on 2-year-olds' use of information from video was assessed. Children who were told "face to face" where to find a hidden toy typically found it, but children who were given the same information by a person on video did not. Children who engaged in a 5-min contingent interaction with a person (including social cues and personal references) through closed-circuit video before the hiding task used information provided to find the toy. These findings have important implications for educational television and use of video stimuli in laboratory-based research with young children.

These researchers frame the issue in terms of the strategies children use to identify socially relevant information:

By the time they reach their second birthday, toddlers have figured out that a prime source of information is other people. They are attuned to socially relevant information: information that is presented by a social partner and accompanied by appropriate cues indicating a shared focus on an aspect of the environment. For instance, numerous studies demonstrate that 2-year-olds are skilled users of a range of social cues for word-learning purposes, including eye gaze, gesture, discourse novelty, and emotional outbursts (see Baldwin & Tomasello, 1998, for a review). Young children's skill at obtaining information from social others may rest in part on their attention to features common to animate agents -- such as the potential for contingent movement and the presence of faces (e.g., Johnson, Booth, & O'Hearn, 2001; Johnson, Slaughter, & Carey, 1998; Shimizu & Johnson, 2004). It is possible that the presence of such features is a precondition for toddlers to use others as potential sources of information. This may be one factor underlying the video deficit in toddlers: in the absence of contingent interaction, they usually fail to regard people on TV as viable information sources. In the current study, when contingent interaction was lacking, children failed to use identical verbal information to solve a problem.

The connection to the ways that children learn to use and respond to explicitly social cues and situations is important. Social interactions are two-way, and that modality is a fundamental part of human reality. Two-way interactions really can't be modeled well by television. But in contrast, three-way interactions are modeled very well by TV. Any program that shows two individuals interacting with each other is fundamentally a three-way interaction, since it implicates the viewer as a third party.

Understanding three-way interactions may be well above the cognitive skills of toddlers. Seeing the relationship between two other individuals is a three-way interaction. Three-way interactions are more difficult for an additional reason -- there are vastly more of them in any social group. With two-way interactions, the total number accessible to any individual is simply the number of individuals in the group, minus the focal individual herself. In other words, it scales linearly with group size. But with three-way interactions, the total possible number of interactions in a group is combinatorial.

Now it is interesting that language learning has been grafted into human development at a time when these kinds of social learning are still being worked out. Plausibly, it reflects the fact that language helps people to organize those more numerous and more complex three-way interactions.

References:

Anderson DR, Pempek TA. 2005. Television and very young children. American Behavioral Scientist 48:505-522. Abstract

Troseth GL, Saylor MM, Archer AH. 2006. Young children's use of video as a source of socially relevant information. Child Development 77:786. DOI link

I've been seeing these ads for this new show, "Jericho", which is supposedly about how a western Kansas town reacts to some kind of nearby nuclear explosion.

I've got to say, I'm freaking tired of seeing mountains in these ads that supposedly happen in Kansas!

Now, you know I'm from western Kansas, and this is looking to me like the worst kind of lunacy since Tom Clancy put a secret bioweapon lab outside of Salina, complete with bus stop on I-70!

Let's read a description:

JERICHO is a drama about what happens when a nuclear mushroom cloud suddenly appears on the horizon, plunging the residents of a small, peaceful Kansas town into chaos, leaving them completely isolated and wondering if they're the only Americans left alive.

(Me: Sure, right. That's totally what would happen. Of course, it's hard to be totally isolated when there's nowhere more than a half-hour drive from anywhere else. Yeah, we're the only Americans left alive because the magic ju-ju bomb has whacked the whole country!

Gretchen: The whole premise is stupid! Do they think that Kansans are all some kind of rubes who disintegrate into some kind of science-fiction scenario as soon as something bad happens?!)

I just don't understand where the mountains are supposed to be. I mean, is this like somebody nukes Colorado Springs, and we're supposed to be able to see it from Kansas? Or did the nukes make the mountains? Have any of these people been to Kansas?