The war over the teaching of evolution in schools has heated up again, nearly a century after the Scopes trial (and nearly 50 years after Spencer Tracy reenacted it in Inherit the Wind). The eminently likeable documentary A Flock of Dodos: The Evolution–Intelligent Design Circus illustrates all too clearly why the two sides may never agree, but in surprising ways. The film divides much of its time between Harvard, where filmmaker Randy Olson received a doctorate in evolutionary ecology, and his home state of Kansas, where the state school board has made headlines for mandating a biology curriculum that casts doubt on Darwinism. The film pits eloquent spokespeople presenting well-chosen arguments against beery poker players with bad hair who ramble incoherently. Unfortunately, the former are the creationists and the latter are the biologists.

Make no mistake: Olson’s intellectual sympathies lie with evolution. But his emotions are with the creationists, whom he finds warm, sincere, even sexy.

Olson chides biologists for failing to state a listener-friendly case for evolution. By underestimating the strength of the well-funded, media-savvy Intelligent Design movement, scientists just might become the mythical dodos of the film’s title—driven to extinction by their own slow-wittedness.

Olson narrates with a light touch and punctuates the film with cartoon dodos, banjo music, local Kansas color, and a New Age octogenarian named Muffy “Moose” Olson who happens to be the filmmaker’s mother. Like Randy Olson, I have traveled both in academic and media circles, and I share his exasperation at scientists who are about as articulate as Valley Girls. It’s hard to know whether to laugh or cry at the biologist who suggests this strategy for confronting creationism: “I think people ought to stand up and say, you know, ‘You’re an idiot.’”

Dodos credits Intelligent Design advocates with a few catchy talking points.
DESIGN: Just as Mount Rushmore couldn’t have been formed by erosion but implicates a human designer, so the vertebrate eye and other organs showing adaptive complexity couldn’t have arisen by chance but implicate a cosmic designer.
IRREDUCIBLE COMPLEXITY (also known as “What good is five percent of an eye?”): Just as a mousetrap on an assembly line is useless until every one of its parts is in place, so biological systems would be useless in any of the intermediary forms required by a gradual evolutionary process.

These are old arguments, and Dodos misses the opportunity to stomp them into the ground. First, we shouldn’t trust our intuition when it tells us that signs of design implicate a designer. The power of Darwin’s theory is that it shows how an illusion of design can be the outcome of a long lineage of replicators. Olson garbles the theory of natural selection by describing it as a competition among species, leaving the theory impotent to explain the Rushmoresque complexity of life.

As for mousetraps, the biochemist Ken Miller (an articulate opponent of Intelligent Design who is mysteriously absent from the film) has pointed out that a mousetrap missing some parts may not catch mice, but it can do other useful things. It can serve as a tie clip, a key ring, a clipboard holder, a catapult, or a nose ring, among other things. Shifts in function (such as fins becoming legs after a lineage of fish first clambered ashore) are ubiquitous in biology—and they explain how complex organs can gradually evolve for a new function while continuing to carry out an older one.

In some ways, A Flock of Dodos is handicapped by its Harvard lineage. Olson attributes the lack of a coherent voice for evolution to the death of his mentor, Stephen Jay Gould. But Gould played an equivocal role in the creationism wars. His lucid essays certainly attacked creationism and illustrated the wonders of evolution. Yet in other ways he inadvertently played into the creationists’ hands.

Gould proclaimed that Darwinism was a theory in crisis, a proclamation gleefully repeated by the “creation scientists.” He vilified some of the most articulate defenders of the theory, like Dan Dennett and Richard Dawkins. And he ridiculed biologists’ attempts to explain adaptive complexity—the very phenomenon that makes creationism plausible to so many people—while championing the eccentric idea (embraced here by Olson) that species are the unit of selection.

The creationists have a third talking point: TEACH THE CONTROVERSY. This is an obvious ploy to sow confusion about Darwinism and thereby clear a space in students’ minds for religion—but Olson never reveals that evolutionary biologists, far from ignoring the challenge, have been agonizing over how to respond to it. If, as Olson suggests, they engage creationists with respectful, carefully articulated arguments, they would be handing them exactly what they want. “See,” the Intelligent Designers would say, “There really is a debate here.” Since the biologists’ case is that there is no scientific controversy, an articulate rebuttal can be self-defeating. Perhaps the best strategy really is to say, in effect, “You’re an idiot.” That was the response of the judge in last year’s landmark case in Dover, Penn., when he described the creationists’ case as “breathtaking inanity.”

A Flock of Dodos is not entirely fair to scientists, and it sometimes misses the mark on the science itself. Still, it’s great fun to watch, and scientists would do well to look in the mirror it holds up.

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Steven Pinker is Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard and the author of The Language Instinct (HarperCollins, 2000), How the Mind Works (Norton, 1999), and The Blank Slate (Viking, 2002).