Stephen Low isn’t sure which line of dialog in his award-winning 2003 IMAX film Volcanoes of the Deep Sea raised the ire of creationists. Maybe it was the one about soft-bodied creatures that were in the seas “hundreds of millions or even a billion years ago.” Or perhaps it was the description of a deep-sea thermal vent as a place that “had seen a billion years of darkness, yet there was no night.”
Low suspects it was the statement that the microscopic hyper-thermophiles living in the hellishly hot, poisonous thermal vents have the same “universal alphabet” in their DNA as humans. “We are most certainly related,” the film’s narrator says. “There is a good chance that this is where life began on Earth, and here … is where we began our journey five billion years ago.”
“That’s just solid science, not controversial, but [creationists] didn’t like that either,” Low...
