No, I haven’t seen Man of Steel yet since it just opened today but I do want to. Among other points of interest: the bad guys, pursuing Kal-El a/k/a Clark Kent to Earth, are animated in the film’s telling by an eerily Darwinian philosophy.

In one clip, chief bad guy General Zod confronts Superman’s birth father Jor-El and calls on him to join in a campaign against the "degenerative bloodlines that led us to this state." Later, in a duel with planet Krypton’s assassin sent to wipe him out, Superman gets knocked around, which prompts the villainess to observe that he is weak: "The fact that you possess a sense of morality, and we do not, gives us an evolutionary advantage. And if history has proven anything, it is that evolution always wins." (See the MTV clip above.)

The only problem with her analysis is that evolution, in the presumed Darwinian sense here, "always wins" by discarding things that don’t give an "evolutionary advantage." That would seem to include the exquisitely tuned conscience with which human beings are gifted — what advantage does that confer? — �the existence of which, as we know well, poses one of many enigmas that a Darwinian view is helpless in explaining.