Flock of Dodos, a new documentary on the controversy between Intelligent Design and evolution, debuted last week at the Tribeca Film Festival. It’s a fine example of its genre, taking on a subject that is important and controversial (if occasionally dry), and treating it in a way that will compel broad interest. The insult in the title is not directed at just one side of the dispute: It lampoons both the supporters of ID, who are wrong on their pet issue, and the evolutionists, who are sometimes dismissive, inept, and arrogant.
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The movie’s creator and narrator is Robert Olson, a Harvard-trained evolutionary ecologist who retired 15 years ago to become a filmmaker. Because Olson is originally from Kansas, his film focuses on the evolution-related controversy that has embroiled the state’s school board in recent years. The documentary is not neutral—it comes down squarely on the side of the evolutionists—but it is mostly fair, and sometimes even sympathetic, to the proponents of ID. And it does aim some tough criticisms at Olson’s fellow Darwinists.
Olson’s gripe with his intellectual allies is that they suffer from a bad attitude, and an even worse ability to communicate to the average person. Because the claims of Intelligent Design seem so transparently absurd to most scientists, and because these scientists are already busy with their own research schedules, too many of them have chosen simply to ignore the creeping popularity of the ID movement. When the occasional biologist has emerged to try to put the record straight, he has typically been encumbered by professional jargon, convoluted speechifying, and sub-par charisma. The result has been ugly: Against the pithy sound bites, flashy presentations, and high-powered PR firms of the light-footed ID movement, the lumbering evolutionists have taken a series of savage beatings in the arena of public opinion.
Olson illustrates (and perhaps exaggerates) the evolutionists’ difficulties. In one of the film’s more amusing scenes, several Harvard biologists huddle around a poker table and get progressively drunker as they banter and bicker and bemoan the rise of the ID movement. Their conversation is intelligent and entertaining, but it’s also annoyingly haughty and dense. In various interviews, the opacity and rudeness of these scientists contrasts sharply with the cordial, down-to-earth demeanor of the average IDer. Contrary to the snobbish stereotype, these ID supporters are not ignorant and prejudiced rednecks, but rather well-dressed, well-meaning, and educated people. Their only obvious failing is that they happen to be wrong about a fairly esoteric question with a counterintuitive answer. And this, as Olson points out, should hardly be the cause of any serious animosity between mature adults.
But the maintenance of civility does not require shying away from the truth, and Dodos could have called attention more clearly to the two central issues of today’s evolution debate. First there is the pedagogical question, concerning whether or not Intelligent Design should be taught as a “scientific theory” in science classes. And then there is the broader philosophical question, concerning whether ID deserves to be taken seriously in any venue, science classes aside.
On the first point Olson makes a decent case, but he could have been more concise: The fundamental problem with teaching Intelligent Design in science classes is that it just isn’t science. By definition, scientific inquiry is limited in scope to providing natural explanations of the physical world. The hypothesis that human life was created by a supernatural intelligence might be true or false, but it isn’t empirically testable, so it simply fails to reach the level of a scientific hypothesis. For this reason, ID cannot sensibly be included in science classes: The pure methodology of establishing physical facts through empirical verification is essential for the continued integrity of science, because it encapsulates scientists’ specialized, time-tested, and uniquely powerful way of advancing human knowledge. Science as an enterprise would suffer great harm if it allowed supernaturalism to creep into its operations, just as religion would diminish itself if it began demanding empirical evidence to back up its tenets of faith.
Here Olson excludes a key point that is helpful to keep in mind on this subject: The teaching of evolution as a limited scientific theory leaves open the broader metaphysical questions of the existence of God and the ultimate origin of life—these are mysteries that require the energies of philosophers and theologians, not scientists. This point appears lost on many of the more vociferous IDers, who seem to believe that the teaching of evolution poses a grave threat to religion and even to the very moral order of society. This is the type of nonsense that stokes the fires of hostility against evolution, and, frustratingly, it has only been fed by some of the more ornery evolutionists, whose deep-seated hostility toward religion has driven them to try to use science as a cudgel against believers. But, as the Catholic Church has acknowledged, religion is not necessarily threatened by Darwin: As an empirical extension of natural science, evolution can in no way disprove the existence of a supernatural God, and it has absolutely nothing to say about matters of morality. By making this message more explicit, Olson could have made evolution even more palatable for a religious audience.
But what about the bigger question: Even if ID is not properly suited to be taken seriously as a scientific theory, how about as a non-scientific theory? Here there are two points to be made against ID, and Olson picks up on only one of them—but he nails it.
Olson’s exposition of this first point hinges on what has become the biggest buzzword in the ID movement: “irreducible complexity.” This concept is the golden calf of ID advocates, who argue that there are some biological structures that are so complex that they could not possibly have evolved through the Darwinian process of genetic mutation and natural selection. The proper functioning of these structures, they claim, requires the simultaneous operation of numerous different components. These components supposedly could not have been of any use to an organism if they had evolved individually on a gradual timescale, so it is not clear how they could have evolved together to form the larger structures.
And so? Do IDers modestly conclude from this that they may have found an interesting challenge that should be the topic of further discussion and investigation?
Well, not exactly: They conclude that, because we can’t presently think of a way that some complex biological structures evolved naturally, these structures must have been fashioned by an intelligent designer. Here you will want to fire up your camcorders: Rarely will you see a logical long-jump that hurdles so many acres of careful reasoning with such soaring ease. If ever there was a record-breaking flight of fallacy, surely this is it.
Olson correctly identifies this “irreducible complexity” canard as a textbook example of “God of the gaps” reasoning, whereby one finds a gap in human understanding of the world, and then immediately plugs this gap by invoking divine intervention. It is by the same thought process that the ancient Greeks deduced the existence of an angry Zeus hurling thunderbolts.
There is a further point to be made here that is even more troublesome for the ID position, but Olson sadly fails to press it. The point has to do with human intelligence: Positing the existence of an Intelligent Designer doesn’t really solve the problem of how human intelligence came to exist. (The answer, “A higher intelligence made it,” only provokes a further question: “How did the higher intelligence come to exist?”) It is precisely the aim of evolutionary theory to address this problem, by explaining how intelligence could have evolved through a bottom-up process. (Whether or not such a bottom-up process was established and/or guided by a higher intelligence would remain a question for philosophers and theologians.)
And so, missed opportunities aside, Olson deserves accolades for his spirited defense of evolution. He has made an entertaining film that will gently prod its viewers in the direction of the truth. For the sake of sound thinking, this is an important accomplishment.
—Anthony Dick is an NR associate editor.
