Category: News Media
Flock of Dodos, or Pack of Lies?
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.
Professor of Design and Nature at Bristol University says Intelligent Design is Valid Scientific Theory
Professor of Design and Nature Stuart Burgess of Bristol University (UK) was interviewed in yesterday’s The Independent. This is a man who knows something about design. He argues that intelligent design is as valid a scientific concept as evolution. Current scientific philosophy is to rule out completely the possibility that a creator was involved. But there is no scientific justification for making such a sweeping assumption. Science should always be open-minded. Newton, Kelvin, Faraday and Pascal had no problem with a creator and with design. There is no reason why a modern scientist cannot take the same position as these eminent scientists. Three hundred years ago, there was so much support for intelligent design that life could be difficult if Read More ›
Flock of Dodos Filmmaker Digs the Hole Deeper in His Hoaxing of Viewers
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.
Hoax of Dodos, pt. 2: Flock of Dodos Filmmaker Uses Fuzzy Math and Falsehoods to Distort the Truth about Discovery Institute
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 Read More ›
Hoax of Dodos, pt. 1: Flock of Dodos Filmmaker Wrongly Claims Haeckel’s Embryo Drawings Weren’t in Modern Textbooks
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.