Roger Ebert believes the Transformers are an excellent example of a discredited pseudoscientific “theory”:
I raise the subject of Creationism because it opens the door to Intelligent Design, which I will require to explain the existence of Autobots. Do you know what an Autobot looks like? At first appearance they’re mild-mannered motor vehicles. They are suddenly capable of unfolding and expanding into gigantic humanoid robots whose size seems optional, since sometimes they can bend over and look a human in the eye, and at other times they are hundreds of feet tall. One might wonder how they pack so much metallic mass into an area the size of a Camaro, and well one might.
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The advocates of ID, who are arguing that their belief should be included in science classes in Texas, Tennessee and other states, say that if a living organism has a design that cannot be explained by the theory of natural selection, it is proof of an Intelligent Designer. If you consider a Camaro, for example, wouldn’t it obviously have had a Designer? Could its parts have been assembled by a hurricane (or a trillion hurricanes) blowing through a junkyard?
This is patently wrong. ID is bunk, for starters. Further, it’s perfectly obvious that the Transformers are a more evolutionarily advanced species that has its genetic roots in Pixar’s Cars. Clearly, the Cars were at some point forced by some evolutionary pressure to develop the ability to mimic a humanoid form. Clearly also, time travel and/or interdimensional travel must be involved, because the Cars observably exist in a posthuman far-future (possible after an ape uprising that wipes out the humans, and then a vehicular uprising that wipes out the apes — I mean, obviously) while the Transformers exist here and now. The Transformers are the Cars’ future, but the Transformers are here in their own past. I mean, obviously.
This is all so self-evident that I’m surprised someone like Ebert could be taken in by ID nonsense.
