Kansas vs. Darwin
by Jeff Tamblyn, Jeff Peak, and Mark von Schlemmer
(Unconditional Films, 2007, 82 min.)

In the state of Kansas, in May 2005, the State Board of Education actually put Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution on trial in a bid to make room for creationism in high school science classrooms. It wasn’t the first challenge leveled against science by the Christian Right, and it probably won’t be the last, but it was certainly one of the most dramatic. And while you may have read about these events in the newspapers, debated them by the water cooler, or perhaps even studied them in school, you’ve never seen them like this before.

Kansas vs. Darwin is a new documentary that captures the often-tempestuous spectacle of the Kansas evolution hearings with a touch that is light, deft, and refreshingly evenhanded. The film blends footage of the three-day-long hearings with interviews of many of their central players as well as candid conversations with ordinary Kansans, shining light on a world where fact can be difficult to distinguish from belief and statements like this one from a young woman at a petting zoo seem perfectly normal: “I don’t believe I’m related to monkeys. Anyone who wants to, feel free, but I don’t think I am.”

Representing the perspective of evolution in the film is Kansas Citizens for Science, a group of educators that organized a worldwide boycott by the scientific community against proceedings they described as nothing more than a kangaroo court. Across the ideological aisle is the Intelligent Design Network, an organization that helped arrange the hearings in hopes of wedging their critiques of evolutionary theory into Kansas biology textbooks. Presiding over the makeshift courtroom are three fundamentalist Christian members of the State School Board—two elementary school teachers and a veterinarian—who do their best to smile their way through a series of scientific and philosophical arguments in which they seem mostly out of their depth. And watching it all through the eye of the camera are three first-time feature filmmakers who impressively manage to take viewers right into the heart of one of America’s most polarized culture wars without ever allowing the film to become a soapbox.

“There’s nothing so unequal as the equal treatment of unequal things,” says Jack Krebs of Kansas Citizens for Science in one of the film’s most memorable moments (he’s paraphrasing Thomas Jefferson). And as one might expect from any thoughtful study on the battle between evolution and creationism, Kansas vs. Darwin does a good job of highlighting the obvious dangers of allowing religious dogma onto an equal playing field with the secular institutions that are the bedrock of democratic society. Part of what makes the film stand out, however, is that it also gives voice to what might be thought of as the “better half” of Intelligent Design, which is its legitimate critique of the materialistic bias (and strong atheistic leanings) of the mainstream scientific community. Indeed, there are moments in the film that powerfully convey the human costs—the loss of meaning, the hunger for higher truths, the increasing experience of alienation and disorientation—that have resulted, at least in part, from the rejection of God by the modern scientific mind. But the darker half of Intelligent Design is on display here as well. For all their efforts to appear reasonable—“All we want is to teach our young people about the controversy”—in the end the members of both the Intelligent Design Network and the State Board of Education seem a lot more motivated by their religious convictions and a tightly-held Christian agenda than by any open-ended inquiry into science, religion, and the nature of human origins.

That the makers of Kansas vs. Darwin allowed these tensions and contradictions to stand unresolved on the screen, inviting the viewer to experience them directly and ponder the subtlety of the issues freshly for themselves, is a testament to their creative aplomb and the film’s greatest strength. Its only real downside is that it presents no alternative perspective on evolution that could shine a more sophisticated light on the simplistic, black-and-white dichotomies that currently define the science vs. religion debate. “I think that’s relatively undiscovered country,” Kansas vs. Darwin’s writer/director Jeff Tamblyn told WIE last fall. “We don’t really understand the relationship of spirituality to science very well, but I agree that there certainly seems to be more to it than what we’re currently looking at.”

For our own ideas on the subject, and an in-depth survey of many alternative perspectives on evolution, check out our “Real Evolution Debate” online or in the January–March 2007 issue of WIE. In the meantime, keep your eyes out for Kansas vs. Darwin on DVD this winter. It’s a captivating cultural snapshot, and not to be missed.

Ross Robertson