Of Dodos and Filmmakers - A Reflection on Randy Olson's <i>Flock of Dodos</i>

Design Paradigm website ^ | April 2006 | Cornell IDEA club

[Tirian]

A recent article on the Cornell IDEA Club website re: the movie "Flock of Dodos" which has been in the news over the past few days (follow the "Reflections" link on the web page listed). The red state/blue state aspect of the movie might be of interest to Freepers. I tried to copy the web site's original formatting to make it readable (can anyone tell me how to import formatted text copied from web pages into the FR posting forms without having to insert HTML to make sure the italics, bold, etc. all appear?)-- Tirian

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Of Dodos and Filmmakers -- A Reflection on Randy Olson's Flock of Dodos by Sigemund

In Flock of Dodos, filmmaker and marine ecologist Randy Olson asks the question, who are the real dodos in the evolution/intelligent design debate: 1) the intelligent design (ID) advocates who disbelieve a purely mechanistic Darwinian explanation for the origin and development of life, or 2) the legions of Darwinist academics who seem unable to connect with and convincingly explain their position to the majority of Americans who stubbornly cling to beliefs in origins that are not solely Darwinian. Flock of Dodos (FOD) is intentionally light-hearted, reflecting Olson’s desire to avoid yet another dreary documentary of droning talking heads, a format which quickly triggers the “Where’s the remote?” reflex in most viewers. Olson is a trained filmmaker, and his stated intent is to connect with his audience on an emotive level. In FOD he succeeds in this, using a combination of often self-deprecating humor, animation and a Charles Kurault-like “on the road” motif.

However, the film is not the impartial assessment of the ID debate as it is sometimes billed. Whether by simply reflecting the filmmaker’s own leanings (he was a tenured professor of evolutionary marine ecology at the University of New Hampshire before turning to filmmaking) or through an intentional desire to do so, the film conveys both explicit and subtle messages that seek to steer viewers at an emotive level against the ID position. I am no expert in ID, having only recently begun to read on the subject. But I have seen enough to conclude that, for whatever reason, FOD mischaracterizes or omits pertinent issues in the ID debate. Some were evident during the film and subsequent audience interaction with Olson; others become more apparent on reflection. In no particular order, I will list some of my concerns:

Straw man argumentation This practice of setting up an easily disproved premise is used several times. FOD first sets up and then dismisses the concept of “perfect design”, citing inherent weaknesses of the human heart and then the peculiarities of rabbit digestion (mysteries that a typical 4-H youth club member would know) as examples of imperfect – and by implication non-intelligent – design. I’ve not yet encountered concept of “perfect design” being promoted anywhere in the ID field, making this appear to be a straw man argument. A more glaring logical error is made in the discussion of Jonathan Wells’ book, Icons of Evolution. Wells debates the validity of a list of high-profile concepts historically used as Darwinian proof-texts (hence the term icons). In FOD, Olson states that if just one of Wells’ icons can be disproved, then the whole book can be discounted. FOD then devotes an interview segment to looking at whether Haeckel’s intentionally mis-drawn embryo figures – indeed once used as a Darwinian proof text and cited by Wells as one of the “icons” – still appear in biology textbooks. Much is made of the fact that the Haeckel figures don’t appear in the books examined on-screen, but this has no bearing on the validity of the other arguments in the book, making FOD’s out-of-hand dismissal convenient but unconvincing.

Omissions Although the filmmakers plead time constraints as their rationale, it is not insignificant that they did not include some of the most formidable proponents of ID, such as Dr. William Dembski. Also missing is the fact that ID is argued for from other disciplinary bases, including information theory.

Running interference In one segment an ID proponent cites the “Mount Rushmore vs. a natural cliff” analogy for viewing patterns of complexity as evidence of design. The interviewer kept injecting the word “human” every time the speaker referred to a “designer”, as though this somehow cleverly undermined the speaker’s metaphor. Clue for interviewer: WE KNOW Mount Rushmore was designed by a human. The point of the analogy is that the influence of the designer distinguishes Mount Rushmore from any other cliff face (the Old Man of the Mountain is the closest we could otherwise expect to come), just as a designer distinguishes a bowerbird nest from a random collection of twigs and litter. A pattern that is sufficiently complex may thus lead one to infer the influence of a designer. FOD could have gone on to discuss how ID distinguishes “specified complexity” from other forms of complexity, but a quick dismissal seemed to be the priority.

Guilt by association Early in FOD there is a “growth segment”, showing us that the filmmaker is open to new ideas and experiences: en route to an ID conference the narrators wonder what kind of ignorant rednecks they are likely to encounter, but are surprised to find well-dressed attendees that speak in complete sentences. They later admit to actually liking ID advocates as great people to sit and chat with. Yet throughout FOD there are subtle guilt-by-association messages, linking ID advocates to “red state” (i.e. Republican/conservative) politics. In fact, the red state/blue state map is shown at one point (although to be honest, a red county/blue county map would have been more accurate, albeit even more daunting to those who regard red as a threat to science and civilization in general). Each time a red state association is made in FOD it is invariably negative, and one can almost hear the Orwellian sheep chanting, “Red state baaaad, Blue state goooood.”

The Evil Empire FOD repeatedly points to the Discovery Institute and their “five million dollar budget” as a dark subversive force at work in the ID debate. Five million sounds like a lot of money – it would be to me personally – but it is not on the national scale. Here (and elsewhere in the public debate over ID) Darwinists like to picture themselves as the heroic but desperately outnumbered Scientific Rebellion defending the last vestiges of civilization against the approaching ID Death Star. Let’s get real about who the five-hundred-pound gorilla is in this debate. Sitting in the auditorium at the local FOD screening were plenty of academics whose combined salaries easily represented a good chunk of five million dollars a year.

Intolerance FOD interviews people on both sides of the recent Dover (Pennsylvania) case, where the local school board voted to require that a short statement to the effect that some people regard evolution as only a theory (as mockingly recited in FOD by two of the dissenting members, incidentally some of the least empathy-inducing people in the film) be read in each biology class, thus irreversibly damaging students’ minds and sending the course of Western Civilization into outer darkness. Olson concludes the segment with one of the dissenting school board members tearfully recounting sharp words (with theological import) from another member, and the narrator leaps to the conclusion that religious intolerance on the part of the school board majority was a primary motivation of the entire issue. If religion would just keep in its place, all would be well. It was thus ironic that, in the question and answer period following the movie, positive mention was made of the number of churches who celebrated “Darwin Sunday”. It is also ironic that prominent Darwinists seem not to shy away from speaking on matters of faith, such as E. O. Wilson’s recent writing as summarized in Harvard Magazine (Nov-Dec 2005, highlights mine): “So, will science and religion find common ground, or at least agree to divide the fundamentals into mutually exclusive domains? A great many well-meaning scholars believe that such rapprochement is both possible and desirable. A few disagree, and I am one of them …There is something deep in religious belief that divides people and amplifies societal conflict. In the early part of this century, the toxic mix of religion and tribalism has become so dangerous as to justify taking seriously the alternative view, that humanism based on science is the effective antidote, the light and the way at last placed before us.”

Ambience An interesting feature of FOD is known as the “Ph.D. poker game” (poker being a suitably Darwinian pastime, assuming the cards were randomly shuffled – but wait, those cards were designed…but I digress) , and afforded the audience an opportunity to see a room full of relatively laid-back Darwinists synergistically interacting on the topic. But there was no parallel scene for ID advocates, who instead were commonly interviewed “on the fly”, which generates a completely different feel toward those people.

Overall, I came away from FOD realizing that it primarily portrayed personalities and events surrounding the ID controversy without really engaging with what ID states in a meaningful way. With the well-publicized calls for intellectual jihad against ID, controversy and debate will only increase. However, I am convinced that discussions should address the foundational issues, rather than simply seeking to steer viewers emotively without truly informing.

IDEA Club at Cornell University © 2006

[Tirian]

As I noted in the posting, the article cites the movie's use of negative "red state" associations -- interesting.

[Matchett-PI]

Related link:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1630623/posts