the way prehistoric animal documentaries will talk about extinction like it happens because of “a failure to evolve” as though evolution is a meritocracy is so funny and so scary

this species persisted over the eons because of its Protestant work ethic to produce more of a specific kind of digestive enzyme that allowed it to extract 4% more nutrients from the dominant plant species in the area

we watched a couple episodes of Netflix’s The Dinosaurs a few days ago and it kept going on about shit like “this dinosaur has found a meal worthy of her future bloodline” like she’s some sort of Triassic era Bene Gesserit

I understand that, but that’s not really what I’m talking about. There is a degree of personification and narrativization that is just kind of inevitable, especially in scicomm aimed at a general public. HOWEVER there is a point at which is becomes egregious and another, parallel point at which it becomes weird propaganda for a christofascist blood and soil worldview. I’m a huge sucker for the Walking with Dinosaurs model of CGI dinosaur documentaries which all have their troubling rhetorical flaws but I made it through about an episode and a half of Netflix’s The Dinosaurs while writing that post before I couldn’t take it anymore… at all times it was 30 seconds away from praising its dinosaur characters for their sigma grindsets and the purity of their bloodlines.