February 2007

The documentary Flock of Dodos depicts biologist Jonathan Wells as a fraud for claiming in his book Icons of Evolution (2000) that Haeckel’s bogus embryo drawings were used by modern textbooks to misrepresent the evidence for Darwinian evolution. But at a screening last Wednesday night at the Pacific Science Center in Seattle, Olson essentially admitted that it was his film that was wrong, not Wells. In answer to an audience question about whether he still maintained that “there are no Haeckel’s embryos in modern textbooks,” Olson replied:

EDITORS NOTE: This is an updated and expanded version of a previous post.

Darwinist-turned-filmmaker Randy Olson showed “Flock of Dodos” in Seattle on Wednesday, February 7. Although the film sacrifices truth in order to tell a good story, it fails even at that. As entertainment, it’s a flop.

But I’m less interested in the film’s cinematic shortcomings than in the way it misrepresents the truth — and in the way Olson is dealing with criticisms of those misrepresentations.

As reported earlier this week (see here and here), filmmaker Randy Olson presented fiction as fact in his anti-ID documentary Flock of Dodos. But rather than apologize for his film’s repeated bloopers and misrepresentations, Olson is now digging himself a deeper hole in recent comments posted to a Darwinist blog.

It was gratifying to read the AP account of Cardinal Schoenborn’s lecture in New York last night and to note the way that His Eminence once again set the media and others straight on the position of the Catholic Church. It won’t make any difference to the Darwinists, of course, because, depending on their audience, they hold either that the Church has accepted Darwinism or that the Catholic Church is just an enemy of reason. Don’t confuse Darwinists with evidence on anything.

In a speech last night in New York City, Roman Catholic Cardinal Cristoph Schoenborn of Vienna sharply criticized efforts in America to prevent students and the public from learning about the debate over Darwin’s theory. According to the Associated Press report:

Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn of Vienna said in a lecture that restricting debate about Darwin’s theory of evolution amounts to censorship in schools and in the broader public.

“Commonly in the scientific community every inquiry into the scientific weaknesses of the theory is blocked off at the very outset,” Schoenborn said of Darwinism. “To some extent there prevails a type of censoring here of the sort for which one eagerly reproached the church in former times.”

Scienceblog writer Josh Rosenau accuses John West of wrongly faulting a 2002 textbook for printing bogus embryo diagrams derived from Ernst Haeckel’s famous faked drawings. Rosenau assures readers: You’ll note that, despite West’s claim that this is “a version of Haeckel’s drawings,” they are actually quite different in their details. These are clearly redrawn photographs of actual embryos, and as such do not bear the taint of any errors Haeckel made, intentionally or otherwise. Trying to smear biologist and filmmaker Randy Olson because West doesn’t understand the subject is hardly honest. Rosenau either didn’t bother to look at the actual comparison images we provided, or he is Olsonizing the issue by deliberately misleading his readers. Click here to see an Read More ›

Note: This is the second of two blog posts responding to the errors and misrepresentations in the film Flock of Dodos. For more information, visit www.hoaxofdodos.com.

In Flock of Dodos, filmmaker Randy Olson tries his best to discredit Discovery Institute (DI), the leading think tank supporting scientists and scholars researching intelligent design (ID). But he only ends up discrediting himself by showing how far he is willing to stretch the truth. This article looks at some of the film’s most egregious errors about DI, starting with its claims about the Institute’s budget.

Inflating DI’s Budget — by over 300%!

According to Flock of Dodos, Discovery Institute has a huge budget for its intelligent design program that dwarfs the resources of evolution’s supporters. “The Discovery Institute is truly the big fish in this picture, with an annual budget of around 5 million dollars,” Olson tells the audience. Later, a woman is shown repeating the same figure. The clear impression left with viewers is that the Institute spends $5 million a year to promote intelligent design.

Not even close.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTA5zm9jYDQ

Note: This is the first of two blog posts responding to the errors and misrepresentations in the film Flock of Dodos. This post is co-authored with Casey Luskin. For more information, visit www.hoaxofdodos.com.

Were Ernst Haeckel’s bogus embryo diagrams ever used in modern textbooks to prove evolution? Not according to filmmaker Randy Olson, who in his film Flock of Dodos portrays biologist Jonathan Wells as a fraud for claiming in the book Icons of Evolution (2000) that modern biology textbooks continued to reprint Haeckel-based drawings.

But it turns out that Olson is the one who is promoting a fraud. The diagrams in question were unquestionably used in modern textbooks, and Olson himself knows that fact.