Dodos: imperfect
Last night I saw Randy Olson's evolution vs. "intelligent design" documentary Flock of Dodos. It was cute, and it had its moments, but it left me a little depressed. One of the suggestions the film makes is that intelligent-design advocates are "winning" because they have more effective public relations, in the form of better slogans and sound bites. The problem with this suggestion and the thinking it represents is two-fold.
First, it precipitously acknowledges that Darwinian evolution is just too complicated for its core principles to be presented in a way that shows, really, that things could not have happened any other way. In fact, Darwin's core insight (variation, heritablity of traits, the fitness concept) is so simple and obvious that an intelligent ten-year old could easily grasp it (forget the fossil record and "evidence"—this concept is at its best and most powerful as a pure thought experiment). Five minutes of screen time would be enough. Instead we get cartoon dodos popping into frames and the suggestion that evolutionists need better PR. 
Which brings me to the second problem: winning a political battle of dumbed-down sound bites and slogans is not a real victory for the cause of science. If you have the truth on your side, you'd better be willing to deploy it, and you should do so comprehensively.
I can understand the reasons for making a light, entertaining, "cause-oriented" documentary. Michael Moore (where has he gotten off to?) certainly made the most of this approach. But I was struck by some missed opportunities and intellectual sloppiness.
The intelligent-design catchphrase "irreducible complexity" and, indeed, the whole movement could have been recast as an expression of the idea that if we don't understand something, it's too complicated to understand (actually, someone does make this point in passing). Someone making the same argument 400 years ago—or 10 years ago—would have been proven wrong. We are no more at the end of science now than on any "today" at any time in human history.
At one point, Olson turns his attention to one of the core texts (such as they are) of intelligent design, Icons of Evolution: Science or Myth? Why Much of What We Teach About Evolution is Wrong by Jonathan Wells (published by Regenery . . . how surprising). The book identifies a series of ideas/concepts/findings that it says are "icons" of evolutionary thought, and attempts to undermine them. In a voice-over, Olson states that he doesn't have time to refute all of the book's arguments, but if he can undermine the premise of even one of its chapters, the whole edifice will be suspect.
Now, that's actually a pretty true argument against a book like that. It is, however, EXACTLY THE SAME KIND OF ARGUMENT that intelligent-design advocates—and old-school creationists—level against the theory of evolution. It seems unwise to provide this kind of implicit support to the rhetoric of "picking away" that is the stock-in-trade of evolution opponents.
posted at 2:47 PM
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