You've Got to Search for the Hero....

Ok, I admit it. I watched the first five minutes of Heroes last night. But there's still hope. Before it was too late, I realised it was a load of old cobblers and I'd be wasting two hours of my life, and I turned over to watch How to Look Good Naked instead.

What is it about visual sci-fi/fantasy that makes me want to claw out my own eyes? Is it the bad acting? The clunking scripts? The ridiculous stereotypes? The moralising? The idiotic pseudoscience? Yes, it is all of those things, but mostly it's just because I love the genre and what it can do, and I hate to see it brought down by naff things like Heroes.

Anyway. In last night's Heroes, one of the main characters, a professor, made a little speech about cockroaches, in which he outlined the idea that cockroaches are the 'pinnacle of evolution', not humans - because, as we all know, they can live off the back of a postage stamp for ten years and can survive without a head, and other cool stuff like that.

The idea that a university professor - of, apparently, biology, indeed - should spout such drivel is laughable (one of the reasons I switched channels) but it ties neatly in with a Ricky Gervais podcast I was recently re-listening to, in which Ricky made the interesting statement to Karl that "slugs are as evolved as you".

One of the things that people find hardest to understand when it comes to evolution is that everything alive today is as highly evolved as everything else. When it comes to life on earth there is no pinnacle; all species are exactly as 'developed' as they need to be, whether cockroaches, slugs or humans. We've all done what we had to do - we haven't died out yet.

The operative word is 'yet', of course.

Anyway, just think about this next time you step on one of these on a rainy day: