#55404: Alon Levy — 12/28  at  08:34 AM
Yeah, but he makes some fun, if utterly stupid, action movies. It doesn't mean I have to care about his idiotic opinions.

#55405: — 12/28  at  08:41 AM
Ghods, Gibson is stupid bastard -- and on many subjects simultaneously. I'm glad I've never wasted two hours of my life on any of his movies.

#55406: — 12/28  at  08:43 AM
I always want to ask "If you're descended from your grandparents, how come your cousins haven't turned into you yet?" Mel is a prize fathead.

#55408: Prince Roy — 12/28  at  08:49 AM
well, technically he's right, no? We didn't descend from monkeys or apes, we all descended from a common ancestor. Not that he'd ever admit it though. Speaking of which, if you stuck 7 chimpanzeez behind seven motion picture cameras, how long would it take them to make a Mel Gibson movie? Monkey see, monkey do...

#55410: — 12/28  at  09:02 AM
It's a shame we let dumbasses like that reproduce.

#55411: — 12/28  at  09:06 AM
Mel isn't the only Gibson with idiotic opinions - his father has an even more impressive track record on that score. Which explains a fair bit.

#55412: — 12/28  at  09:13 AM
Darwin's Street Heavy vs. Mad Mel?!? Supersize that vat of popcorn and diet Coke, barkeep. And don't spare the "butter."

#55413: — 12/28  at  09:14 AM
This argument is so stupid that even Answer in Genesis "think" that creationnists should not use it ( http://www.answersingenesis.org/Home/Area/faq/dont_use.asp ). And, since "[t]he primary authority for Answers in Genesis is the infallible Word of God, the Bible", how could they be wrong?

Desnes

#55414: — 12/28  at  09:22 AM
David Neiwert over at Orcinus has had, over the past couple years, several posts about Hutter and Mel. Head over there sometime and do a search. Bottom line: Hutter (Mel's dad) is an out and out Holocaust denier and all around wacko who Mel has said he holds in the highest regard and whose views he's never denounced in the slightest degree. Mel's mom, BTW, is a whole-hearted partner in her husband's lunacy.

This all was during the period when Mel was filming Passion and claiming it was an accurate account taken from the Gospels and not from the source he eventually admitted it was taken from, the ravings of an anti-Semetic 19th century German nun.

#55416: — 12/28  at  09:27 AM
To defend Mel, he is absolutely correct.

Back in 1972, i was an ape, all i had to do was eat, sleep, tend to my harem and protect my little patch of land. I evolved into a human in '75 and that has probably been my best decision yet.

(dumbass)

#55419: — 12/28  at  09:34 AM
It's so stupid, so easily rebutted, and so indicative of a complete lack of thought about this argument they have jumped into, that I'd honestly like to find out what they are thinking.

For someone like Mel Gibson to say this means they don't understand the theory at all. So it's not a lack of thought but more a lack of understanding.

Whenever you post a comment by a celebrity, it's always so fun watching the their whole life's work get trashed.

#55420: Arun — 12/28  at  09:45 AM
As per Gibson, does the existence of a derivative breed of horse or dog or rose mean the original breed must be extinct?

#55421: — 12/28  at  09:48 AM
Sounds like Mel and Larry King have the same edition of the Origin of Species, the one edited by Lamarck. It's bad enough dealing with the resurrection of Paley and Pascal, but this....

May be it is high time to make war against the vitalists, and their PoMo apologists.

I have been of the opinion, being a history of science lightweight, that it is the vitalist strain of evolutionary theory that underpinned the eugenics movement in Germany (that same strain that probably developed from German science of the period into the 'evolutionary deterministic' models in the geomorphology of William Morris Davies, the Clementsian model of plant community dynamics; and environmental determinism of Ritter, Semple, and Huntington).

Mike

#55422: — 12/28  at  09:52 AM
this isn't even the funniest stupid quote from the interview. My favorite is the whole "I don't remember what it was or what it was about, but my Dad told me about it..." conspiracy thing.
He doesn't say so explicitly, but it appears that when he made the movie "Conspiracy theory" he thought it was a docu-drama.

#55423: — 12/28  at  09:55 AM
What I want to know is why anyone gives a rat's ass in the first place what celebrities think about topics outside of their narrow specialties. Who cares what some dopey actor or pop singer thinks about science or politics or any issue of substance? Their opinions are about as informative as the endorsements from a guy who's not a doctor but plays one on TV.

Perhaps we primates have some evolutionarily-derived propensity to trust the proclamations of the alpha males and females merely because of their social status?

#55425: The Rev. Schmitt. — 12/28  at  10:00 AM
Nature: In my case at least it's always something of a shock to hear something so daft so authoritatively stated by someone I have an emotional investment in. He does seem like an extremely likeable, charistmatic guy onscreen, but with a statement like that and his equivocation about Holocaust denial the illusion he crafted can be shattered - particularly if you're debunking this stuff a lot. That being said Mad Max and Lethal Weapon are phenomenally fun movies to watch, and Signs is still terrible.

No matter how often I see that ape argument I still can't believe a human being said it.

-The Rev. Schmitt.

#55426: — 12/28  at  10:06 AM
Mel isn't the only Gibson with idiotic opinions - his father has an even more impressive track record on that score. Which explains a fair bit.

I knew someone would bring this up. We’re done with their life so soon. Now we're moving on to their families. Then I guess their schools, then their country, maybe even their hemisphere. ;)

#55427: — 12/28  at  10:08 AM

What I want to know is why anyone gives a rat's ass in the first place what celebrities think about topics outside of their narrow specialties. Who cares what some dopey actor or pop singer thinks about science or politics or any issue of substance? Their opinions are about as informative as the endorsements from a guy who's not a doctor but plays one on TV.

Or indeed people who become celebrities purely by accident of birth, such as the members of the British Royal Family.

Which reminds me of a gloriously demented "debate" of a few years ago in which Prince Charles, Princess Anne and Prince Philip all took up differing positions on the subject of genetically modified foods, with the British media reporting every syllable of their various utterances as though it was holy writ. This is despite the rather glaringly obvious fact that none of them was any more qualified to pontificate on the subject than... well, any of their subjects, chosen entirely at random.

There's an amusing summary here.

#55428: — 12/28  at  10:10 AM
He does seem like an extremely likeable, charistmatic guy onscreen,

Mel is a good actor. He's said other daft things so I wasn't really surprised at this.

#55429: — 12/28  at  10:15 AM

What I want to know is why anyone gives a rat's ass in the first place what celebrities think about topics outside of their narrow specialties. Who cares what some dopey actor or pop singer thinks about science or politics or any issue of substance? Their opinions are about as informative as the endorsements from a guy who's not a doctor but plays one on TV.

Well, Mel Gibson's views on religion and the holocaust is relevant because of his films. He is currently working on a movie or mini-series on The Holocaust, and his Passion of the Christ was based on some rather theorlogical doubtful sources.

However, his views on evolution should be of no interest (unless he decides to make a movie about evolution or Darwin's life).

#55430: — 12/28  at  10:15 AM
John,
Perhaps not trust as much as need to obey, being social animals with a status hierarchy.

But also, people who listen to their idol identify with him/her, and furthermore may want to emulate (the success of) that artist.

#55431: — 12/28  at  10:17 AM
using gibsons "logic", since dinosaurs are extinct then birds did evolve from them and evolution has to be true.

#55432: Orac — 12/28  at  10:23 AM
I've written about what a wingnut Mel is before. His father, Hutton Gibson, is a conspiracy theorist and anti-Semite who believes that all Popes since Vatican II are illegitimate, that Vatican II was a plot by the Masons and Jews to destroy the Catholic Church, and that the Holocaust never happened. Mel himself has flirted with Holocaust denial in various interviews and has bankrolled a breakaway Catholic sect that believes in such "traditionalist" Catholicism and rejects Vatican II, helping to finance the construction of a Church in Malibu.

It doesn't at all surprise me that he would be anti-evolution.

#55433: — 12/28  at  10:28 AM
First off, I'm not a Gibson fan, although "The Passion" did provide some homoerotic thrills (let's just say Jesus wasn't the only one who got wood during that movie), and I really sort of liked his "Hamlet." Yes, I am serious.

But second--and let me preface here that I KNOW THIS IS WRONG--I think I get the "why are there still monkeys" gambit. The question ASSUMES special creation in the first place, because it's sort of like asking, "If we now have DVDs, why are there still VHS tapes?" That is, if a newer, "better" model has come out, why isn't the "obsolete" model simply scrapped?

Of course, this belies an utter failure to understand how evolution works, and the best analogy I can think of would relate to languages. Latin is dead as a an extant spoken language, but French, Portuguese, and Spanish are much alive, because each one found a "niche" in which to survive, flourish, and replicate itself. If Mel asked me the monkey question, I might ask him, "If some people speak French, how can some people speak Spanish?" Then I might follow up with a question about what happened to him when he was little that attracts him now to movie scripts with torture in them. Because that's more than a little kinky.

Anyway, seen through a "creator-as-manufacturer" lens (which assumes what it hopes to support), the question about why there are still monkeys has a sort of internal logic. Which is, of course, dead wrong.

Trackback: Mel Gibson sobre la evolucin Tracked on: Las penas del Agente Smith (66.162.134.137) at 2005 12 28 10:33:19
Respuestas como estas hacen que Playboy reciba el calificativo de “obscena” algunas veces. PLAYBOY: So you can’t accept that we descended from monkeys and apes? GIBSON: No, I think it’s bullshit. If it isn’t, why are t...