March of the Dodos

"Michael Moore's films are great," Randy Olson has told the Kansas City Star, "but I've never seen a debate afterward." Olson's documentary, Flock of Dodos: The Evolution-Intelligent Design Circus, aims to provoke discussion through the filmmaker's encounters with inarticulate, media-shy evolutionary biologists and with advocates of intelligent design, a Totally Legitimate Scientific Theory that species were created miraculously appeared suddenly, designed by the Lord an intelligent entity with the power to do that kind of thing. Like all Totally Legitimate Science, the latter is seeking acceptance in public school classrooms in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Kansas before it moves on to peer-reviewed science journals. In Pennsylvania, the trial and subsequent ouster of the Dover school board resulted in the the most entertaining legal decision Bostonist has ever read the whole way through, as well as a dire predictions from Pat Robertson, Meteorologist of the Apocalypse.

Last night, Flock of Dodos premiered before a sold-out crowd of scientists, intelligent design advocates, and noncombatants in Kansas. On Monday evening, you'll have the chance to watch the carnage from the safety of science-infested Cambridge (just smited with an unusually mild January) when Olson returns to Harvard, where he did his graduate work in marine biology, for the second-ever screening of his documentary. (Tickets are available from the Harvard Box Office.) Harvard biologist James J. McCarthy and New York Times science reporter Cornelia Dean will be on hand to spar with any Discovery Institute fellows or militant Pastafarians in attendance.

Post contributed by C. Fernsebner. Can you believe it? A whole post about Dodos and not a single Bush joke.