Intelligent Design?

Skandar Keynes is doing interview number gazillion with the European and Asian press today – I’m somewhere between the Pole and the Malaysian – and yet he looks sort of relieved.

It’s not that this particular conveyer belt of hacks is any more charming and articulate than yesterday’s chain gang. We are, however, less likely than our American counterparts to start pointing at the 16 year-old and blaming him for the Holocaust.
Pardon?
What can the young actor have done to warrant such accusations? A bright, unusually articulate fellow, Skandar likes Queen, watches Family Guy, wears Converse sneakers and favours orange Smarties.
“Oh, and Grey’s Anatomy”, he tells me. “My guilty pleasure is Grey’s Anatomy. I’d claim it was only for the medicine but that wouldn’t explain why I watch Sex And The City and Project Runway.”
The very antithesis of a Movie Brat, his onscreen career is, he says, “an accident”, an unintended sequence of events that began when his mum signed him up for an after-school drama class at a community theatre when he was 11.
“It’s strange,” he says. “I feel like I lead two completely different lives. On the one hand I’m staying in great hotels and going to random locations all around the world making this film and publicising it. On the other hand I go to school like everyone else on the bus and you just slot right back into everyday life and forget that this other world really exists.”
Despite sterling work as Edmund in The Chronicles Of Narnia; The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe and its superior forthcoming sequel The Chronicles Of Narnia; Prince Caspian, he’s hoping to cut his Hollywood career short in favour of medical school in two years.
This last ambition is not too surprising, hailing as he does, from a thoroughly academic background.
“My family... well they are all about science,” he says. “And they think about everything. I remember one of our family dinners... it was my grandfather’s 90th birthday. I got my food and as I sat down I heard my uncles all get together and one of them said, ‘So, what are we going to do about these new taps?’ And they had this long conversation about taps. Two hours later, it’s still going.”
It’s this fusty extended clan that has landed Skandar Keynes in trouble with a small but vocal minority within the US press pack. As the great-great nephew of the economist John Maynard Keynes and the great-great-great grandson of biologist Charles Darwin, the London born schoolboy is no great favourite with the Intelligent Design lobby, a contingent that takes a particular interest in C.S Lewis’ Narnia series.
“I just can’t understand it,” says Skandar. “These people just don’t care about reason or facts. I knew that before now. I just don’t know when they started accusing Charles Darwin of causing Hitler to commit genocide.”
Sadly, this barmy view has gained popularity following the release of the recent Ben Stein hackumentary Expelled; No Intelligence Allowed. A conspiracy theory rant that accuses ‘Big Science’ of suppressing creationist teaching and silencing criticisms of modern evolutionary theory, the film traces a bizarre line from The Origins Of The Species through Communism, Fascism, atheism, eugenics, Planned Parenthood and, in particular, the Final Solution.
Mr. Stein, who, prior to assuming the mantle of arch conservative evangelist, was the bit actor best known as Ferris Bueller’s headmaster, repeatedly misquotes Darwin over images of concentration camps throughout the film. His dubious arguments are part of a larger effort by the Discovery Institute – the hub of the ‘intelligent design’ campaign – to introduce Academic Freedom bills in American State legislatures. These anti-evolutionary amendments aim to promote the teaching of intelligent design while questioning the academic standing of evolution in US public schools.
Poor Skandar Keynes, who, prior to his recent publicity tour for The Chronicles Of Narnia: Prince Caspian, had only the vaguest knowledge of American anti-evolutionary fervour, found himself right in the propagandists’ line of fire.
“It was so strange. I’m just here to talk about the movie. But people keep asking me things like ‘How do you feel knowing that your ancestor caused all this?’
“It’s crazy,” he adds, with a baffled grin. “But I don’t really mind if those people don’t like me. Who’d want to be in their gang?”