|
|
Movies
Flock of Dodos: The Evolution-Scientific Design Circus
Darwin Lives in Dodos
This is one of the few movies that I have seen over the past 10 years on television. I rarely record films and never watch them live on TV due to lost time in commercials and edits along with a myriad of other problems. Therefore, it was a big thing for me to watch this one. Not long after moving in, my brother and I were flipping through the channels when we stopped on Showtime where they were showing a documentary on the Intelligent Design vs. Evolution debate. We only caught the end of it, but this is a topic that I really enjoy to hear about, so I decided to bite the bullet and tape it.
About a month later I finally took the time to watch it and was not displeased. The film is made by a embryo biologist who had grown up with the knowledge that evolution was a fact. However, over the years, he noticed how the public as a whole had not accepted it and was even pushing back against it. To add to this, his mother had sent him clippings from Kansas where the school board had tried to push religious origins into the curriculum. This was defeated, but now in the present day, a new board was up to the same old tricks, trying to get intelligent design added to the curriculum.
Along his path to find out where we had gone wrong with Evolution, he interviewed numerous scientists and tried to get to the bottom of some of the groups that spent the money and time trying to push Intelligent Design. By his nature as a scientist, he would occasionally poke at the holes he found in their logic, but only rarely went over to fully biasing the piece. He interviewed members of the board and in the end pulled together a group of the top minds in Evolution for a game of cards. What he found out was that scientists had all the facts they needed to get their message across, however, they were not charismatic and often not even civil when discussing the matter. Meanwhile, the Intelligent Design people were working on a shaky basis which they worked to create out of thin air to begin with, but put it across in a way that was easier for people to swallow.
The scientists were able to easily discover that the Intelligent Design push was merely a repackaged Religious offering disguised by duping some scientists into opening a gap that they could later charge through. However, they kept getting repelled at every turn by government groups who saw through their charade and would not give in to their pressuring.
In the end, the movie was very informative and entertaining as well. The creator went for long stretches without biasing it, but on occasion gave into whimsy and showed how ludicrous the Intelligent Design people were. He never came anywhere near the Michael Moore level, though, which kept the film enjoyable for me. I would not be surprised to see him doing more documentaries in the future, but as this seemed to be his true cause, I wouldn’t be surprised if he didn’t. However, if you are interested in the topic or generally like documentaries, I would definitely give this one a go, it was well worth it to me.
In the end, I give Flock of Dodos a 9.