The Passion of the Penguins?

Social conservatives have adopted March of the Penguins, calling it a strong case for intelligent design and a passionate affirmation of traditional norms like monogamy, sacrifice and child rearing (or should we say chick rearing?). They point out that the filmmakers glossed over evolution and global warming, which makes it even more conservative-friendly.

Are these people talking about the same movie I saw about the same penguins?

Let's take this in order:

Intelligent design. I don't think I can say it any better than George F. Will: "If an Intelligent Designer designed nature, why did it decide to make breeding so tedious for those penguins?" You'd think an intelligent designer who had plotted this out from the beginning would have made ease of species propigation a priority. See below, discussion of evolution and climate change.

Monogamy. The movie pretty much glossed over this, too, but while the penguins will stay together as long as there is a chick to rear and neither parent gets eaten, they're really only as monogamous as their options and will part ways at the first sign of trouble. If a male penguin is a day late returning to the rookery, it is likely to find its previous season's mate has moved on, given the narrow window when successful breeding can occur (by the way, also the reason they converge at the same time). Of note to these penguin-morality advocates, species of coastal-nesting penguins will literally prostitute themselves, allowing mating favors for any male with nesting materials (puts a whole new spin on The Pebble and the Penguin).

Sacrifice. When did getting eaten by a leopard seal become a family value?

Chick-rearing. They're birds. They propigate the species. That's what they do. Chicks don't rear themselves when its -70 out. Also, apparently these people missed the scene where all the adult penguins stand around while the juvenile is chased by a gull intent on dining on penguin chick.

Evolution, or lack thereof. Actually, this was one of my petty complaints about March of the Penguins. They do gloss over the evolutionary theory, in a (successful) attempt to make the film as broadly appealing as possible. They give one short toss-off line, "For millions of years, they have made their home on the darkest, driest, windist, and coldest continent on Earth. And they've done it pretty much alone." Barely even a nod to evolutionary theory, since all it really says is that penguins are more than 6,000 years old. Early protopenguins evolved around 50 million years ago, but these were not the Emperors. The first protopenguins were closer to the size of a full grown man, while Emperors are more analogous to a husky 7-year-old. Granted, March of the Penguins is supposed to be an 80-minute trek into the mating and chick-rearing habits of the Emperors, not a comprehensive primer on penguin behavior and history. However, since they do leave us out in the cold as to possible reasons why the penguins would go through all this to breed, there's the chance that the penguins come off as insane. After all, other penguin species breed with just as much success in far more hospitable areas of the continent. Nature doesn't create pathos for pathos's sake, but logic doesn't make a good film.

Climate Change. Again, while there really wasn't space in the movie for it, climate change and how it relates to penguin behavior is actually quite interesting. Around the time the first protopenguins were establishing themselves, Antarctica was segueing from a temperate climate to the current coldest-place-on-Earth status. The evidence is all there in the ice cores and the fossil records for at least 8 cycles of glaciation over the past 740,000 years. There is a chance that when the penguins started making this trek inland for breeding, it wasn't a 70-mile trek over ice, which would make it much more sensible. The penguins' trek may have been an adaptation at one point, and they've simply kept doing it since no other adaptation has taken its place. But that gets into evolutionary theory, and that turns off the people who print out the downloadable form to write down how God speaks to them as the penguins waddle across the screen.

Don't get me wrong. March of the Penguins was one of the best movies I've seen, and in spite of the anthropomorphizing, certainly one of the better penguin documentaries. Very few nature shows deal so frankly with chick loss, the ineptitude of adults in their first couple of mating cycles, or the myriad other ways mating can fail. Most nature programs go no further than the obligatory predation shot. I just don't see where all these conservative values fit in the penguin species. They're penguins! I love them, but they act on instinct.