When I listen to supporters of Intelligent Design explain the reasons why they believe it, my reaction depends on who's talking. If I'm hearing a religious zealot defend I.D., I just wave my hand and go "Feh, just another closed-minded creationist." But when a scientist starts explaining why he believes in I.D., I listen, because, coming out of a scientist's mouth, the concept almost makes sense.
But then I think about it some more, and I usually end up coming to the same conclusion: that they're all full of crap.
That's the conclusion filmmaker Randy Olson comes to in his entertaining documentary A Flock of Dodos: The Evolution - Intelligent Design Circus, which opened at the Tribeca Film Festival on Sunday. But, considering Olson comes right out at the beginning of the movie and talks about his previous life as an evolutionary ecologist, you know where he is coming from in the debate, anyway. What Olson tries to demonstrate in his film, though, is that both sides of the evolution/I.D. debate have their issues. While the I.D. folks have really no scientific basis for their argument and are doing the public a disservice by trying to push the issue into public school cirricula, the evolutionists are communicating their message poorly, or as Olson says, they're "handicapped with their blind obsession with the truth."
Olson, who thought of the idea for the movie after reading a New Yorker article about scientists that support I.D., sought to illustrate the debate mostly through the story of the Kansas state school board's decision to teach I.D. in the public schools. Since Kansas is Olson's home state, he takes this story to heart, dragging both an old Kansas University friend and his mother -- a free-spirited 82-year-old that is affectionally dubbed Muffy Moose -- into the story. Both are there to feed Olson information and help with the interviews, as his mother does with one of the evolution supporters on the Kansas board. But he also interviews some of the more conservative members of the board, including an ardent I.D. supporter, Kathy Martin, and he seems to enjoy her company, even though he doesn't agree with her stance.
Indeed, one of the movie's strengths is that Olson treats the supporters of Intelligent Design with the utmost respect, even though, as he says it, that I.D. can't be taught as an alternate theory to Darwinism because it is "stalled out at the intuition stage." He is charmed by I.D. advocate John Calvert (a Kansas neighbor of his mom's), despite the fact that he comes away from the interview with an unchanged mind. He gently debates with leading I.D. scientists such as Michael Behe and Jack Cashell, and actually lets them make their argument, mainly that there are structures out there that are too complex to be explained by the slow progression of evolution, a theory called "irreducible complexity". Because of this, something or someone had to design these structures, according to these scientists.
But he quickly counters their arguments with those of professors who demonstrate that there is no intelligence in some biological design. Some of Olson's friends demonstrate this by showing a pet rabbit eating its own poop, something it needs to do in order to complete the digestion process. Other scientists, such Steven Case, find the I.D.ers' "gap theory" indefensible, because they're teaching people to either be anti-intellectual or challenge their faith, especially if the gaps later get filled by scientific findings.
The crux of the problem, though, is that evolutionists are eggheads who are too busy talking above people's heads to try to get the word out. This is demonstrated by a poker game Olson plays with eight men who have PhDs in evolutionary science. Many of them condescendingly put down I.D.ers, calling them ignorant, then overexplain why evolution shouldn't be questioned. Meanwhile, the I.D. contingent, backed by the deep pockets of right-wing think tanks like the Discovery Institute, have gotten their talking points down, which is why they seem to be "winning" the debate, even though their scientific evidence is sketchy at best.
Olson does a good job of taking what could potentially be dry material and livening it up with animated segments (loved the cartoon dodos... Olson even brought a few life-sized ones to the screening I went to on Monday) and lighthearted asides with his mom and two former school board members in Dover, PA, Jeff and Carol Brown. The Browns resigned from the board when it tried to introduce a two-paragraph statement about I.D. into the high school biology cirriculum, a decision that was later overturned in federal court (by a Bush appointee, no less). They have the funniest moment in the movie, which I will not spoil.
A Flock of Dodos does drag in spots, especially when Olson goes into some biographical details about his parents and also when he delves into the doings of the Discovery Institute. But it's an appealing movie that sheds some light on a debate that's sure to escalate in the next few years. Even though its point of view is firmly in the evolution camp, it gives the audience enough of the other side's view to almost make them think I.D. is plausible. Almost.