Doppelganger at 50 Books has a post of lists that she intends to write, among them "Books I read only after seeing the movie."  Most of the time, it’s the other way around–I read the book, and then I bemoan the adaptation.*  But here we are…

• J.R.R. Tolkein, Fellowship of the Ring: To be fair, I had read The Hobbit years before the LOTR films were released.  I still haven’t read the other two thirds of the trilogy.
• C.S. Lewis, Chronicles of Narnia: Well, the first three books, anyway.  I was getting sick of Lewis by the end of the third book and had to put my impressive one-volume set down.  I know I should like it, but I just don’t.
• Lemony Snicket, A Series of Unfortunate Events: The film was great, and I soon received the first two books as a Christmas gift.  I was hooked immediately.  Since first receiving those books (Christmas 2005), I’ve read all 13 books and the Unathorized Autobiography.  Wonderful stuff, and the film was a decent interpretation.
• J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the [X]: I’m noticing a fantasy theme in this list.  I long resisted Potter-mania, fulfilling my Anglo-American duty by restricting myself to the films.  I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the books, though I think that Snicket and Gaiman are far better writers in the children’s lit genre.

That’s all that comes to mind.  Short list, but I’ll add some more if I can think of any.

 Anyone else?

*A secondary list: Worst movie adaptations ever.  Of course, to qualify for this list, the book has to be really good and the movie proportionately bad.

• Timeline (2003, dir. Richard Donner): Oh, my.  Where do I start?  The Crichton novel was truly innovative, and one of his best.  It balanced astrophysics and story nearly perfectly–also, it noted the language differences between modern English and middle English.  But Donner’s interpretation is a silly action film that is sillier and more cliche-laden than the worst Lethal Weapon film. 
• Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005, dir. Mike Newell): Perhaps I’m being unfair when I group this mediocre film with the mindless dreck in the first item.  I place it here, though, because the novel is excellent while the film has a great deal of problems.  Characters appear in places without any context for them being there, important subtexts are excluded–all in all, I think this book was simply too big to be adapted to film.  Newell tried the best he could, but I’ve never been satisfied with the result.
• The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997, dir. Steven Spielberg): Filmmakers just don’t get what makes Michael Crichton such a good writer.  He’s not a stellar master of prose, but he’s a genius at making science both entertaining and thrilling.  He creates characters that the reader can care about while crashing toward an inevitable conclusion.  Spielberg, who got it right the first time (although, notably, Crichton was involved in the script only for the first film and not for its sequel), delivered an awful adaptation with cardboard characters.  The movie was pretty, and it was entertaining, but it bore little resemblance to Crichton’s excellent sequel.
• The Shining (1980, dir. Stanley Kubrick): Maybe I could have a secondary list to this one (I won’t, but I could–and Timeline would be on it, as well) titled, "How dare you so thoroughly screw up my favorite books."  Kubrick was a master of enduring images, but his reworking of one of King’s best novels (only second to The Green Mile, Hearts in Atlantis, and maybe Bag of Bones) is a pathetic excuse for a psychological thriller.  Ech.  I’m going to stop before I go on too long.

Incidentally, I’m suspicious of any film adaptation of Michael Crichton or Steven King.  King is especially good at psychological terror, but filmmakers just want to show the gory parts; Crichton novels are robbed of any nuance and made into bad action films (I’m looking at you, Congo). 

It’s hard to tell exactly what Alessandra Stanley sees in Lost and Heroes that signals the decline of American society.  She starts by complaining about the series’ paranormal* underpinnings but ends by complaining that the shows, Lost in particular, have large and devoted fan bases despite weaknesses in plot (or, perhaps, they have weaknesses in plot because the writers pay attention to the desires of the fan base; there’s sort of a "chicken-and-the-egg" problem).  There are also some unwarranted swipes at fans of the fantastic, for whom the shows "provide an alternative society for those who don’t fit comfortably into their own."  A particularly nasty parenthetical further describes these unenlightened people as such: "That is to say, smart, socially awkward adults and all 12-year-old boys."  In this way, Stanley goes beyond complaining about the individual shows and on to complaining about fantastic fiction and comic books.

Are we listening yet?  Fans of the fantastic are maladjusted to reality; they’re acting out ridiculous fantasies–fantasies to which Stanley, television reviewer for the New York Times, is immune.

I think all of us who patronize fantasy and comic books should offer Stanley a word of thanks.  Thanks for showing us the err of our ways.  Oh, we thought we were broadening our minds, exciting our imaginations with stories we knew to be false (yet somehow truthful under the surface), assuming that the interaction of word and visual artistry is a valid form of storytelling.  Thank you, oh New York Times writer, our savior from ourselves, for your rich analysis of our psychology ("The fans of these kinds of serialized thrillers are unusually passionate and devoted, carrying a clout not unlike that of anti-abortion activists — their intensity is in some ways more powerful than their numbers").  We will burn the comic books, turn off our television, and get to reading the Skeptical Enquirer and other sources of entertainment that will not dull our poor, though college-educated minds.

Anyone with me? 

*N.B. I say "paranormal," not "supernatural."  The latter refers to divinity (e.g., God parting the Red Sea is a supernatural event), while the former refers to events that can’t be explained by empirical meethods and aren’t typically explained by religion. 

One thing I’ve been thinking a lot about is the tendency to distort science to one’s political view.  Or, rather, to cite armchair and back-of-the-envelope calculations as proof that one has a legitimate position. 

I started reflecting on this a long while back when Dr. Zach Moore of the Evolution 101 podcast analyzed the claim that Intelligent Design theory is debated within the scientific literature.  Dr. Zach’s argument, I felt, deserved both merit and skepticism.  First, he took a hard look at the Discovery Institute’s list of peer-reviewed and peer-edited literature about ID.  Naturally, he found some holes in the list.  Book chapters cannot be counted as independent because they are commonly invited.  Review articles, similarly, are rarely peer-reviewed.  None of the peer-reviewed articles, according to Dr. Zach’s assessment, presented experimental data; rather, they were theoretical or "framing the debate" essays.  I’m not competant in the field to assess Dr. Zach’s conclusions, but I like his methodology.  Pointing to words on a page and saying, "See!  Scientists are debating this stuff!" is insufficient.  The reliability and authority of the words must be assessed.

I think Dr. Zach slipped up, though, when he tried to provide some anecdotal evidence of the scientific consensus on evolution.  I don’t doubt that his conclusion is correct–that is, a staggeringly high proportion of biomedical scientists support evolutionary theory–but his methodology was poor.  He plugged the word "evolution" into Entrez Pubmed, the search page for the National Library of Medicine (at over 16 million citations, the world’s largest medical library), and came up with a staggering amount of articles (my search shows 189,069).  He attempted the same thing for the terms "intelligent design" (my search: 551 without enclosign quotations and 63 with enclosing quotations) and "creationism" (my search: 54).  He noted that many of the articles in the latter searches were invited, letters to the editor, "framing the debate" papers,or  oppositions to ID/creationism–leaving a small number of mostly theoretical papers that supported ID.  The problem with this methodology is obvious to anyone who has spent any time using searches with tags: that is, searching for "evolution" without tags searches the entire entry for the word.  It does not search for the concept, and does not put the word into the proper context.  The word "evolution" means a great deal more than the biological theory under discussion.  Pubmed entries generally have abstracts, and many of them use "evolution" to mean things that are irrelevant to biological change.

A more reasonable search strategy would be to use the MeSH database–Pubmed’s taxonomy.  A search for the MeSH term "evolution" (i.e., "evolution [majr]") reveals 40,902 entries–a relatively small fraction of the number quoted on Dr. Zach’s show.  The number is still not entirely representative–the first three items on my search are letters in Nature.  Still, the lower number makes Dr. Zach’s point quite effectively: evolutionary theory seems to be, at a minimum, discussed a great deal more than ID/creationism, neither of which have a MeSH term and, in any case, do not have any entries using the more generous tagless search.  Even so, the sloppy methodology employed by Dr. Zach potentially puts his credibility into question.  Although he used the searches as examples within a larger argument, such a weakness is easily exploited by the conscientious. 

This situation illustrates the place of back-of-the-envelope calculations in the current scientific debates.  Statistics and factoids and other forms of anecdotal evidence are thrown around without regard to the myriad ways they can and perhaps should be debunked.  Dr. Zach seems, from his podcasts, like a good scientist–indeed, an exemplary one–but even he falls into this trap.  This situation proves to me that scientific argument should be purged of back-of-the-envelope calculations and all other anecdotal evidence.  Scientific opinion only, please, on both sides.