Living World Lecture Series
Sponsored by the Department of Ecology and Evolution, Stony Brook University
"Flock of Dodos: The Evolution-Intelligent Design Circus" by Randy Olson
Monday, September 19, ESS Auditorium
Randy Olson
Filmmaker and former biologist Dr. Randy Olson's documentary film (84 minutes)
probes the great communications struggle around evolution vs. intelligent design
being waged in today's mainstream media. Olson's humorous, enlightening and
sometimes sobering journey includes in-depth interviews with top experts on
intelligent design, school board members, and lawyers, and footage from an evening
with evolutionists who gather for a game of poker and evolution debate. Stony
Brook University premiered this film in the New York area and we had an overflow
crowd of over 550! Come see what the fuss was about.
Randy Olson got his Ph.D. from Harvard University in ecology, but has become a well-known film maker of both serious interviews with a wide variety of scientists and fishermen and a series of humorous film shorts that are educational and irreverent. He is a lecturer at the University of Southern California and leads an organization known as Shifting Baselines (www.shiftingbaselines.org) that educates the public about the tremendous changes in natural communities that have occurred, to an extent that current generations cannot understand just how biologically rich the world was just a few generations ago. His website has a series of film shorts on this topic that are poignant and highly informative.
His newest film is "Sizzle: A Global Warming Comedy" released in July 2008.