Posted on 02/10/2006 10:18:17 AM PST by SirLinksalot
Screening airs evolution versus intelligent design debate
By Alvin Powell
Harvard News Office
This just in from the front lines of the battle between evolution and intelligent design: evolution is losing.
That's the assessment of Randy Olson, a Harvard-trained evolutionary biologist turned filmmaker who explored the debate in a new film, "Flock of Dodos: The Evolution - Intelligent Design Circus," which was screened Monday (Feb. 6) at the Harvard Museum of Natural History.
Evolutionary biologist and filmmaker Randy Olson greets audience members before the screening of his film. Featuring Harvard faculty as well as scenes shot within the museum, the 90-minute film strikes a humorous tone as it explores the debate, poking a bit of fun at both intelligent design and the scientific community.
Though Olson is obviously on the side of evolution, he exposes the shortcomings of both sides. He portrays intelligent designers as energetic, likeable people who compensate for their shaky theory's shortcomings through organization, personal appeal, and money. Scientists, on the other hand, squander their factual edge through indifference and poor communication skills.
But Olson said there's something deeper than the surface face-off between those on the front lines. The efforts to teach intelligent design in the schools is backed by media-savvy, well-financed organizations like the Discovery Institute that aren't afraid to hire high-powered public relations firms to advance their cause.
And, though the position of evolution supporters has been upheld by the U.S. courts - most recently last year in the Dover, Penn., case - Olson predicted that the battle isn't over.
"What's going on is not being called 'a culture discussion,' it's being called 'a culture war,'" Olson said in a panel discussion after the screening.
The film is centered on the debate over teaching evolution in the schools of Olson's home state of Kansas and also covers the Dover, Penn., case.
Despite his scientific background, Olson handles intelligent design proponents gently throughout the film, giving them a chance to air their views. He offers some anti-design examples, like the fact that a rabbit's digestive tract is designed such that vegetation breaks down in a portion that comes after the part that absorbs nutrients, forcing rabbits to digest their food twice to get any value from the food. Rabbits do this by eating pellets that they've excreted to pass them through a second time, prompting the film to ask, "Where's the intelligent design in this?"
But rather than offering a detailed explanation of evolution or a point-by-point rebuttal of intelligent design, "Flock of Dodos" probes how it is that, 150 years after Darwin published his theories and 80 years after the Scopes Monkey Trial, a debate over evolution is raging in this country.
Though he concludes that intelligent design is a theory that has stalled at what he calls the "intuition stage," Olson says in "Flock of Dodos" that it still appears to have the upper hand.
The movie includes several shots of the inside of the Harvard Museum of Natural History, most recognizably the whale skeleton hanging from the ceiling, complete with remnant pelvic bones attesting to a time when the whale's ancestors had legs.
The movie also includes several Harvard-trained scientists, as well as faculty members Karel Liem, the Henry Bryant Bigelow Professor of Ichthyology, and James Hanken, professor of biology and director of the Museum of Comparative Zoology.
Olson received his doctorate from Harvard in 1984 and was a professor at the University of New Hampshire from 1988 until 1994, when he left the university shortly after receiving tenure to attend film school at the University of Southern California.
Olson participated in a panel discussion after the film with James McCarthy, Alexander Agassiz Professor of Biological Oceanography, and New York Times science writer Cordelia Dean. The panel was moderated by Douglas Starr, co-director for Boston University's Center for Science and Medical Journalism.
Dean said the debate has remained alive because the scientific community has failed to make the case for evolution to the ordinary person. That is at least partly due to neglect, she said.
"They often see no necessity to do so, and our society as a whole suffers for it," Dean said.
McCarthy said that may be because of the nature of the scientific subculture itself. Scientists are discouraged from drawing too bold conclusions from their research and from not mentioning sometimes multiple caveats on their findings, traits that make it difficult to craft and deliver a clear, persuasive message to the public.
"It's so counter to our training as scientists to give a flip answer or to give an answer without all the caveats," McCarthy said.
Where is the sun?
It's wained so long I look wan.
That's precisely what I did. Try reading my reply more slowly. Better still, read on, Pup.
For instance, speaking exoskeletally as point "A":
Did an eyestalk evolve first and then wait aound for the organism in question to develop the eye to fill it? And if so, where did the chitenous protein arrive from to form the eyestalk? How was the new brainstem made aware that it would soon be needed to operate the cognitive function of the as-yet-un-"evolved" eyeball? And what of the nervous system, the receptors in the retinal cortex and the subsequent cicuitry needed to transmit the neurally interpreted image to the brainstem for eventual recognition?
OR... did all of these things just explode onto the evolutionary scene unbidden?
And if so, where is the fossil record of that event?
Second instance, speaking endoskeletally as point "B":
Did an orbital socket evolve first and then wait aound for the organism in question to develop the eye to fill it? And if so, where did the calcified nutrients arrive from to form the skull? How was the new brain made aware that it would soon be needed to operate the cognitive function of the as-yet-un-"evolved" eyeball? And what of the cornea, the lens, the nervous system, the receptors in the retinal cortex and the subsequent cicuitry needed to transmit the neurally interpreted image to the brain for eventual recognition?
OR... did all of these things just explode onto the evolutionary scene unbidden?
And if so, where is the fossil record of that event?
The conundrum to which I explicitly referred in my prior reply expresses unambiguously that each of these systems; Nervous, Respiratory, Circulatory, Skeletal, Musculature; are all interdependent and irreducibly complex.
That means that each is so dependent upon all the others for its existence and function that they could not develop one at a time while waiting around for the others to catch up.
THEREFORE, either they exploded into being in a Mini-Evo-Bang, all at once (and if they did, where is the fossil record?)...,
...or they were Created in a massivley complicated master design by The Creator, which would explain not only how they all came into interdependent being at once AND why there exists no fossil record.
Science also teaches that the most elegant (simple) explanation is often the correct one.
Ah, argument from incredulity
Actually, I cited both incredulity and the fact that such an assumption constitutes an explicit abdication of every principle of known science. Your pseudo-Democrat-like oversimplification does a severe disservice to an otherwise enjoyable intellectual discussion. Please try to avoid the same in the future
Try to keep up. I do like your enthusiasm... it almost makes up for your obtuse and petulant inattentiveness.
;-/
http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CB/CB301.html
http://www.don-lindsay-archive.org/creation/eye_time.html
The short summary is that for an eye, there is no question of irreducible complexity. Half an eye is very useful if you pick the right half. The same is true of many of the other body parts or systems you mention. Plenty of examples exist of creatures that have less complexity than humans and survive just fine.
Mr. Felton.......... that was a very good post.
I address all of the many interdependent systems in complex multi-cell organisms, and you choose to reply about the "eye." How thoroughly pointless and evasive... just like all Evo-Junk-Scientists and their Kool-Aid swilling prostheletytes
bump
I was neither pointless nor evasive. I directly addressed what you wrote most of your previous post about, the eye. The evidence for the evolution of an eye is very clear, since "reduced complexity" versions of each possible step in its evolution still exist in nature today. If you can't even be troubled to understand the "junk science" regarding something as simple as an eye evolving, why should I bother responding to the rest of the systems you asked about?
I'm skeptical of ID, but I really don't like how evolution is being defended in the courts and legislatures. It's becoming a State Non-Church. It may as well be Henry VIII writing the laws of physics.
To modify what you said, so that I would be 100% in agreement:
Unguided evolution as an explaination of life through random origins is as Faith Based as Christianity, more so than ID
Darwin’s great discovery was that it was not unguided. Anyone who thinks evolutionary theory is about random changes does not understand evolution at all.
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