Toward the end of my first semester in college, I had an epiphany. I was taking a famous entry-level (but rigorous) biology course, Nat Sci 5, taught by the Nobel laureate George Wald. The assignment was to go to Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology and look at the worms. Yes, the worms, preserved in jars and arranged according to their taxonomic categories. Row upon row of them. That was the assignment: not to write a report, just to look. 

​

There were not many people looking at the worms on the wintry afternoon when I went to the museum to do my homework. I rather doubt that there ever are. The scene struck me as bleak and a bit bizarre. I was the only living thing in that hall. But as I kept walking down the rows of jars and looking at the worms, I was suddenly struck with a sense of wonder. Each type of worm was different. Some differences were minute, some flamboyantly obvious. How and why had nature produced such an array? My head was spinning as I grappled with the mysteries of the universe. I know this sounds melodramatic, but my encounter with the worms had, in some small but lasting way, changed me. 

​

I recount this long-ago educational adventure for two reasons. One is to make it obvious why the title Peter Coonradt chose for this film project, “The Closer You Look, the More You See,” speaks to me directly. The other is to explain why I place such value on the film’s achievement: to place viewers in the presence of scientists who have never lost their sense of  wonder at the natural world and who, unlike me, have devoted their professional lives to answering my 18-year-old’s questions of how and why. 

​

The answer at large is, of course, evolution, itself a great adventure story of human persistence and ingenuity that is recounted here. More precisely, the answer lies in the DNA of butterflies and frogs, in the fossils of animals that while they lived were on the path to becoming a new life form, and in the halls of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, the great research institution that the film illuminates and celebrates. More broadly, whatever future our species has on this earth lies in the hands of the enthusiastic young people whose own learning adventure is captured here. May they all have many epiphanies.