Evolution doesn't explicitly require Perl.  Those two utilities are considered supplemental, and are not required for the normal operation of Evolution.  So Perl would be a "suggested" package in Debian lingo.

That said, I see that Evolution /is/ dragging in Perl by some other requirement, but I'm not sure which.  There's spamassassin, but that's already split into a separate package.  There's autoconf and automake, but those are only build requirements.  I don't see any other likely candidates.

Is there a good way to search for this or display an RPM dependency tree?

Hi Matthew,

My understanding of RPM (and it could well be wrong) is that if a file in an RPM is a perl file it will pull in perl by default. Hence by just having these files in the package the depsolve routine will pull in perl as a result. I've seen other packages in the past either remove the offending files to remove the dependency or move them to a sub package to move the dep down a level. The other way of bringing in a perl dep is in scripting in the actual spec itself.

Example of moving it to a sub package is ntp
Example of it in the spec file is docbook-dtds

I use 'rpm -qR package' to see what a specific package depends on.
There's also other options in this mailing list post 
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2008-September/msg00001.html

Fixed in evolution-2.24.0-2.fc10.

  $ rpm -q --requires evolution | grep perl
  (no output)

  $ rpm -q --requires evolution-perl | grep perl
  /usr/bin/perl
  perl(Text::ParseWords)
  perl(diagnostics)
  perl(strict)