Randy Olson's Flock of Nonsense (Update on John Angus Campbell)

Well, it seemed like it was time to link all these Flock of Dodos write-ups of yesteryear in one place.

• Is Haeckel's Recapitulation a Strawman?
• Randy Olson's Creationist Shill
• Questions about Flock of Dodos and Jonathan Wells
• Randy Olson's Flock of Anti-Creationist Statism
• Punches Pulled: Michael Behe Doesn't Care
• Punches Pulled: Haeckel's Embryos in Peer Reviewed Literature

To sum it up, Olson's unprofessional (and unethical, I think, as a documentarian) treatment of John Angus Campbell, Jonathan Wells, John Calvert, and Michael Behe, either in the film or in the "Pulled Punches" follow-up, marks the film as schlockumentary.  Olson highlights some matters as essential that he is later free to dismiss as trivial when he's shown to be wrong.

In other words he engages in the very thing he defines as "Trivia Tackling": "trying to take down a large institution, idea or individual, not by assailing the large and significant parts, but by doggedly locking on to pieces of trivia."  The closest thing to "assailing the large and significant parts" in Flock is when he talks briefly about Behe's mousetrap analogy.  We see no intense discussion between Olson and Behe about the mousetrap, which would have been interesting, nor about any evolutionary matter with Behe that Olson has any expertise.

Something I noted recently is that John Angus Campbell (the "fake" Darwinist in the film) has his own website in which he clarifies his beliefs and his position on ID, and how Wikipedia mischaracterizes him.  He is politically liberal, and a subscriber to neo-Darwinism who has long advocated "teaching the controversy."  He ended his association with Discovery Institute when he started to find himself in the cross-hairs of Discovery Institute's political enemies.

When Wikipedia and The Weekly [a tabloid] mistakenly assumed I was supporting ID (and the religious right!) rather than promoting argument as a way of engaging a classic text [Darwin's Origin] - (and this before audiences who particularly needed to read it) the DI [Discovery Institute] affiliation had outlived its usefulness [for what?] and it was time for me to move on.*

Like Kenny Rogers, Campbell knew when to fold 'em, when to walk away, when to run.  Congratulations, Campbell. You too are a "secular creationist" for aiding and abetting "anti-science."  Question: Did Randy Olson consult anything other than Wikipedia to learn about Campbell?

See Campbell's concise rebuttal to Wikipedia and the Seattle Weekly:

• Overview  
• Errors in Fact  
• Errors in Implication  
• Conclusion 

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Randy Olson's Creationist Shill

I was tired of being told that my structuralism reduced to "creationism" by those who have no understanding of either.
  -- Richard Sternberg 

Randy Olson, in his documentary Flock of Dodos that purports to be an objective inquiry into Intelligent Design both as a (possibly) scientific enterprise and as a social phenomenon, talks about a subject interviewed at an ID convention who claimed to be a Darwinist but later seems to have not been.

This subject seemed noteworthy, Olson seems to present, because it seemed unusual to have a non-creationist spouting a teach-the-controversy view, let alone attending an ID conference as something other than a heckler or guerrilla documentarian.   Olson's big reveal is that this Darwinist is John Angus Campbell who is (or was) a Fellow at the Discovery Institute.  Olson is vague on this point and seems to rely on the audience to assume that Campbell's warm relationship with ID is in conflict with his conception of Darwinism.

Olson elsewhere does include footage of Michael Behe saying he believes in common descent and macro-evolutionary speciation events, and Olson presents Behe as the spokesman for ID in vague terms ("some say" he is the leading expert on Intelligent Design), so it would seem that Behe embraces some form of Darwinism being more or less convinced of several important tenets.  Behe is certainly not Darwinist enough for Olson, since he not only denies the sufficiency of natural selection for certain macroevolutionary feats but he also thinks that the influence of an intelligent agent is better explanation that the other rivals of the selectionist point of view.  (Olson's film implies that Behe is the leading idea-man of what he obviously considers an anti-evolution movement.)