Good evening, people of Adelaide.
Hi, my name is Randy Olson, and I am here to give you a few words before you view my
movie, Flock of Dodos, the Evolution, Intelligent Design Circus, and this is a movie that I
made in 2006.
We premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival, then it aired on Showtime for a couple of
years, and I've taken around and shown it more than a hundred times at universities
and museums throughout the United States.
It's a really fun movie because it looks at this controversy over the teaching of evolution
in primary and high schools, and it arose in the summer of 2005 when it was an extremely
heated issue, particularly in the state of Kansas, which is where I grew up, so I ended
up going back there with the film crew and filming this.
One of the things people find most fascinating is that I ended up interviewing people from
both sides of the issue, and a lot of academics and liberals that get so mad at these people
attacking evolution ask me, why didn't you ever slap any of the guys when you were interviewing
them, and people always say that to me, I would have reached across the table and punched
them.
Well, I don't know, I grew up in Kansas with a lot of religious people and have a basic
kind of respect for religion, and so I really didn't see it as that contentious of an issue.
The issue itself actually has died down quite a bit in the United States since December
2005 when there was a federal ruling against the Intelligent Design Movement and the Dover
Trial, which you'll learn about towards the end of the movie, and that ruling basically
snapped the spine of the entire movement of Intelligent Design.
They're still kind of spinning in circles trying to figure out how to deal with it.
All they could think to do is to try and attack the judge, calling him an activist, but the
problem was he was a right-wing Bush appointee conservative, and in fact I was on a panel
discussion with him a couple years ago and he was a wonderful guy, John Jones.
So the result is that the movement has kind of been in shambles since then, but the overall
effort to try and introduce the teaching of creationism and cloaked as Intelligent Design
in schools in the United States is very much still alive.
The state of Texas has a lot of struggles there with their school board, and it's not
likely to go away.
They're just, I think they're really kind of in remission right now trying to think
of a new strategy with which they can launch this, because that was how Intelligent Design
cropped up a little over 10 years ago.
It was really a whole new way to approach the creationism idea, and it's a funny movie.
You're welcome to laugh, hope you will laugh, and when it's over there's lots to be talked
about, so hope you enjoy the movie and look forward to seeing all of you when I get there
on May 15th.
See you then.
Bye.
