A Dodo Celebration for Darwin Day

Whatever happened to the cool kid who sat in the back of high school honors chem and snickered because he was smarter than the teacher?

He got his Ph.D. from Harvard, abandoned academia for the film industry, and is now poised to appear in a movie theater near you.

Introducing Randy Olson, a 1984 graduate of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, who stopped by the Museum of Fine Arts last Saturday to screen his first full-length documentary feature, “Flock of Dodos,” as part of a nation-wide, week-long screening tour in honor of Darwin Day. Olson is the kind of guy who banters about embryology over a hand of poker, and includes his mother, Muffy Moose, in a documentary about evolution versus intelligent design.

Olson’s documentary is a hybrid of these two ways of life: armed with the science of evolution, he has created “Flock of Dodos” with a good-natured sense of absurdity that makes sure that the scientists get mocked just as much as the intelligent designers.

Olson described his challenge as finding “a charismatic voice for the world of science.” His film casts the conflict between evolution and intelligent design as one of politics rather than science, in which the key weapon, as in any political contest, is likeability.

According to Olson, the intelligent designers are gaining ground not because their arguments are more compelling, but because they have catch phrases to back them up. The scientific community, on the other hand, struggles to be comprehensible putting themselves at risk of following the dodo into extinction.

The most obvious comparison for Olson’s work is to that of another laid-back Midwestern documentarian, Michael Moore. Olson says he welcomes the overlap—to a certain extent.

“I have admiration for [Moore], but there’s no persuasion,” Olson said. “I don’t want to beat people over the head.”

He talks to intelligent design advocates in his home state of Kansas over pints of beer at the university bar, or over brownies and lemonade at the home of one of the Kansas school board members pushing to include intelligent design in the state’s education standards. He is polite but firm, letting them have their say without hesitating to call them out when it’s ridiculous, and always presenting their words in context.

With the evolutionists Olson is a little tougher, and a recurring humor device in the movie is his interrupting their segments to define particularly academic terminology. The only appreciable difference in his treatment of the two sides is that he doesn’t doubt the science behind the evolutionists.

Olson spent his entire life studying biology—marine biology, evolutionary biology, and embryology—before scrapping it all in 1994 to attend film school at the University of Southern California. Both parts of his biography seem to play an important part in the way he chooses to tell stories: as a scientist, he deduces conclusions from data collected in the field; as a film school graduate, he pieces separate bits of film together into a coherent whole.

Olson was also frustrated by what he found to be the dry, dull, and downright boring science documentaries he saw that were giving his profession a false reputation. “Flock of Dodos” is the antithesis of all of these stultifying films, keeping the masses entertained with clever animations, rousing bluegrass background music, and occasional periodic commentary from the sparkling Muffy Moose, who may very well be the liveliest 83-year-old on the planet.

Though the film has yet to be released widely, there have been dozens of screenings of the film all across the country, including many in Kansas just before the state school board’s Feb. 13 decision to strike intelligent design from its state education standards, which led some pundits to throw part of the credit to “Flock of Dodos.” Showtime network also plans to air the documentary in May, suggesting that the scientific community may have found its voice at last.

No matter the flaws of the intelligent design argument, human beings like simple answers, and the established scientific community has yet to oblige. Olson and his film aspire to act as liaisons between the “pointy-headed intellectuals” Olson grew up with and the distinctly round-headed public.

“It’s not a very cerebral movie,” Olson said of “Flock of Dodos.” “It kind of comes from the heart, from the gut.”

—Staff writer Jillian J. Goodman can be reached at jjgoodm@fas.harvard.edu.