THE CLOSER YOU LOOK,
THE MORE YOU SEE
A FILM ABOUT
EVOLUTIONARY SCIENCE
AT THE MUSEUM OF
COMPARATIVE ZOOLOGY,
HARVARD UNIVERSITY
Evolution is the most powerful, revealing, transformative, inevitable truth that humans have ever discovered. Andrew Berry, Lecturer in Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard, takes you behind the scenes to explore groundbreaking research in evolutionary biology at the Museum of Comparative Zoology, a renowned research center not open to the public. Harvard scientists reveal the inner workings of the evolutionary process and ponder challenging questions about who we are and where we came from. The film demonstrates the rewards of patient, rigorous, detailed observation. The closer you look, the more you see.
The film’s twelve captivating episodes give a clear understanding of how evolution works and why we know it’s true.
MEET THE SCIENTISTS
MEET THE PRODUCTION TEAM
Andrew Berry and Peter Coonradt
Peter Coonradt
I made my first film in Widener Library at Harvard when I was an undergraduate there, class of 1968. Since then all I’ve done is make films, videos, movies… whatever you want to call them. Making films is how I engage with the world.
I’ve shot films in Belize, Nicaragua, the Sea of Cortez, California central coast, Pacific Northwest, northern Vermont, farmworker communities where poverty and happiness are not mutually exclusive, a deep dark bat cave in West Texas Hill Country where I sank into squishy guano swarming with dermestid beetles while inhaling a mist of bat urine and rabies virus, among other places where revelations hide in the unknown.
Evolution infiltrated my consciousness twenty-five years ago when I read The Ancestor’s Tale by Richard Dawkins and Janet Browne’s two-volume biography of Charles Darwin. I had no idea how to wrap my arms around such a vast, multi-layered subject in a film until I met Andrew Berry and he introduced
me to The MCZ and scientists there who showed me a world I
never knew.
Andrew Berry
Andrew was perhaps fated to become an evolutionary biologist. He attended Shrewsbury School in the U.K. whose most famous alumnus is… none other than… Charles Darwin. Darwin's presence hovered benignly and encouragingly over Andrew’s education. Andrew’s undergraduate degree is in zoology from Oxford and Ph.D. is in evolutionary genetics from Princeton.
He’s been teaching evolutionary biology at Harvard for a while – with the timescale in question veering close to the
geological one.
Andrew’s research combined field and laboratory methods to detect positive Darwinian selection (i.e. adaptive evolution) at the molecular level in natural populations. In addition to technical articles, he has published in the London Review of Books and elsewhere. He has published two books: Infinite tropics: an Alfred Russel Wallace anthology, 2003, with a foreword by Stephen Jay Gould, and DNA: The Secret of Life
with James Watson, 2003. Andrew also wrote the introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of The Malay Archipelago by Alfred Russel Wallace (2014).
In addition to lecturing at Harvard, Andrew teaches evolutionary biology regularly at Sabancı University in Istanbul, Turkey, and is
accordingly a popular target of by Turkish creationist organizations.
REFLECTIONS ON THE FILM
Wildlife Photos by Gonzalo Giribet
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