Science Never Sleeps

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps is an awful film.  The original Wall Street didn't need a sequel, but if you're going to make one, try to avoid something that's talky, silly and dramatically slack.  But that's not why I want to write about it.

I couldn't help but notice something when I watched it on cable recently.  It starts with Shia LaBeouf's character narrating.  In fact, the writers thought what he says so significant that they repeat it at the end of the film.  It's about evolutionary bubbles being like economic bubbles.  LaBeouf states the mother of all bubbles was the Cambrian Explosion:

Happened around 530 million years ago.  And over the next 70, 80 millions years, the rate of evolution accelerated so fast that we came along.  The human race.

Huh?  First, it's silly to compare the Cambrian Explosion, which took millions of years, to economic bubbles, which come and go quickly. ("Explosion" is perhaps a misleading term.) Second, it is true most major phyla came about during this period, but the human race? Yeah, in a roundabout way, the Cambrian Explosion led to humans, but not until several major extinctions, and quite a few lesser ones, cleared the way for us hundreds of millions of years later.

The writers are stretching way too hard for a useful metaphor.  And they're not done with evolution.  Later LaBeouf is arguing with a co-worker about how to pitch a new energy company at a meeting.  He supports fusion, while she's doubtful:

"They've been saying that fusion is five years away for the past forty years"
"It is.  Laser fusion is the future."
"Oh, can you prove that, boy genius?
"Can you prove evolution, girl genius?  That seems to work though, right?"

Maybe a Wall Street junior exec can't prove evolution, but if Shia would bother to call the biology department of a local college, I'm sure they could satisfy him.