By Alexander Lane
Rutgers University professor Richard Lutz goes looking for undersea volcanoes, not controversy. So the soft-spoken scientist is surprised to find himself on the front lines of the culture wars.
Lutz was the chief scientist for Volcanoes of the Deep Sea, one of three IMAX films that had distribution problems in the South in the past couple of years, the makers said, because it included references to evolution.
Now he has emerged as something of a spokesman for censored scientists, a role he's clearly not relishing.
“He just wants to play with his volcanoes and look at his hot sulfur vents,” said Ken Branson, a Rutgers spokesman. “He's not a front line wild and crazy guy.”
Lutz, 55, has been a marine ecologist at Rutgers in New Brunswick, N.J., since 1980, directing the university's Center for Deep Sea Ecology and Biotechnology since 1995. He is one of the foremost experts on deep-sea hydrothermal vents, which are openings in the sea floor out of which hot fluids pour.
Discovered in 1977, the vents host ecosystems of bacteria, clams, crabs, octopuses and other creatures. What fascinates scientists is that these are the only food chains on Earth based on energy not from the sun but from chemicals in the planet's interior.
In 1979, as a Yale University postdoctoral researcher, Lutz quickly dropped his research on shallow-water mollusks and accepted an invitation to travel 11/2 hours down to the deep sea in a submersible vehicle called Alvin to study the vent-dwellers.
About 100 trips later, he's alive and well, despite once getting stuck on the bottom for some 16 hours when sediment bogged down the craft.
He and other scientists have discovered 500 vent-dwelling species and counting, with another turning up every two weeks.
Lutz and director Stephen Low brought IMAX cameras and 4,400 watts of lights down to the vents to film Volcanoes of the Deep Sea, funded mostly with a $2.1 million grant from the National Science Foundation and a $1.5 million loan from Rutgers. It was to be marketed to museums and science centers, about 35 of which lease equipment from the IMAX Corp. to show the giant-screen films.
In addition to lush views of the vents, the film includes a couple of references to the possibility that life originated there.
“There's a very strong case for that,” Lutz said. “If you're a fundamentalist in the Deep South, you would have a great deal of trouble with that, but it didn't even occur to us when we were making the film.”
The movie opened in 2003 at about nine theaters, mostly in the Northeast. It expanded to a few more screens in subsequent months, but had trouble cracking the South. One indication why came in a December letter to the Columbus Dispatch after the film opened in Ohio.
“Breathtaking and unchallenged macroevolutionary presumptions surpassed the film's breathtaking beauty,” wrote the reader, Holly Ramsey. “No mention that a common Creator, rather than a common ancestor, fits the evidence equally well.”
Somewhere between nine and 12 museums in the South avoided even booking the film in anticipation of such criticisms, Lutz said.
Representatives of museums in Charleston, S.C., and Fort Worth, Texas, were quoted in news reports saying they were concerned the evolution references would alienate Christian audience members. Similar concerns reportedly hampered the distribution of Cosmic Voyage and Galapagos, two other IMAX films.
Some Christians have long disputed Darwin's theory of evolution, and they seem to have gained momentum of late. A number of organizations skeptical of evolution, such as the Creation Studies Institute in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., are growing. Bills are pending in Alabama and Georgia that would allow public school teachers to question evolution in class. President Bush has said the “jury is still out” on evolution.
Museum directors' fears aside, creationists have not focused on the film. Thomas DeRosa, executive director of the Creation Studies Institute, said it was far from Topic A among his membership.
Religion News Service
Alexander Lane is a staff writer for the Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J.