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Ben Stein's 'Expelled' - Evolution, Academia and Conformity
eldavojohn writes "Painting the current scientific community as just as bad as the Spanish Inquisition, an extended trailer of Ben Stein's "Expelled" has a lot of people (at least that I know) talking. It looks like his movie plans to encourage people to speak out if they believe intelligent design or creationism to be correct. In the trailer he even warns you that if you are a scientist you may lose your job by watching 'Expelled.' Backlash to the movie has started popping up and this may force the creationism/evolutionist debate to a whole new level across the big screen and the internet."
adholden points out a site called Expelled Exposed, which asserts that 'Expelled' "is simply an anti-science propaganda film aimed at creating controversy where none exists, while promoting poor science education that can and will severely handicap American students."
My work here is dung.
One well known evolutionary scientist P.Z. Myers was queueing up to see a preview screening of this movie, when he was singled out of line and asked to leave the cinema. So he was expelled from Expelled, presumably because he would write it up for the trash it was. A double irony was he was standing next to Richard Dawkins who was apparently not recognized and allowed in.
Now I admit there are a lot of atheists out there who understand science just as badly as some Christian fundamentalists and have turned it into some kind of religion, but that says nothing about the validity of the science itself, just like idiot Christians say nothing about the validity of the Christian faith.
Intelligent Design cannot be falsified, therefore it is not science. ID can explain Pegasuses, dragons unicorns and cyclopses just fine. That makes it useless, since that also means it cannot predict anything. Without predictions, you cannot have new scientific insight.
I lost my sig.
Of course scientists have strong opinions, and of course they have biases. This isn't a problem. Einstein, for example, was a fierce opponent of quantum mechanics -- the 'spooky action at a distance' doesn't fit with c as a speed limit.
But the fact is that one of the primary goals of just about every scientist is to challenge or overturn the conventional wisdom. And to so in a way that is observable and disprovable. You don't get a ticket to Stockholm by echoing the community.
Similarly, every true scientist values being proven wrong, because that is what advances our collective knowledge. A scientist who who has never been wrong, or who doesn't appreciate being proven wrong, is a poor scientist indeed.
But on the same note, challenges to established scientific principles must themselves be scientific, and that is the problem here. This creationist doctrine, whatever term proponents choose to call it, is fundamentally non-scientific -- even anti-science. If a theory can't produce hypotheses, can't be tested, can't be disproven, and can't make predictions, then it's not a theory and certainly not science.
Read my blog.
The comments here are basically taking the movie at it's word -- that Intelligent Designers are being "expelled" from academia.
This is a lie. The whole movie is a lie. The irony of both invoking Nazis, yet so successfully implementing the "Big Lie" strategy has to set some kind of reprehensible high water mark.
The three "expelled" people presented in the movie -- these are the worst stories the filmmakers could find -- involved a professor who failed to get tenure because he wasn't good enough, a woman who had her contract run out and didn't have it renewed, and them someone who said he was "fired" from the Smithsonian, despite actually being an unpaid research assistant whose term ran out.
Compare and contrast.
This movie makes utterly baseless claims that the academic freedom of ID proponents is under attack.
This is a lie.
Yet, they tell the lie, and then you look at comments about the movie, and you have people assuming that the truth is "somewhere in the middle", or that "both sides need to be considered", or some other trite cliche.
Why do they get a free pass here? Seriously, the production of this movie has been filled with lies by the makers -- these allegedly religious people -- and yet, people still take the movie at face value.
They lied to the interviewees, they attempted to pirate animations used in the movie, after being humiliated during the pre-release screenings they lied to cover it up, they lied to the people who wanted to see screenings -- they're liars.
And then you look at comments here, and people talk like the movie makes valid arguments -- it does not. Aside from lies about academic suppression, it's just one long Godwin -- "there's a very tenuous link between social Darwinism and the philosophy of the Nazis, therefore believing in Evolution leads to the Holocaust".
If, in an argument, someone tells baseless, reprehensible lies about a subject, the truth isn't "somewhere in the middle". The liars are really just lying.
Reprinted below:
A talking point among "climate sceptics" on both sides of the Atlantic has been the bizarre tale of how the BBC's chief reporter on climate change censored an item on the BBC website after being harried by a "climate activist".
On April 4 Roger Harrabin posted a story on the fact that world temperatures have not continued to rise in the past 10 years, and this year will fall to a level markedly below the average of the past two decades.
Citing the World Meteorological Organisation, Mr Harrabin accurately reported that "global temperatures have not risen since 1998, prompting some to question climate change theory".
This was a red rag to Jo Abbess of the Campaign Against Climate Change (Hon President, George Monbiot), who emailed Mr Harrabin demanding that he "correct" his item.
Mr Harrabin insisted that what he had written was true. There are indeed eminent climate scientists "who question whether warming will continue as predicted".
This only angered Ms Abbess further. She said it was "highly irresponsible to play into the hands of the sceptics", to "even hint that the Earth is cooling down again".
Mr Harrabin, though he has led the BBC's tireless promotion of warmist orthodoxy, stood firm. Even in the "general media", he replied, "sceptics" highlight the lack of increase since 1998: to ignore this might give the impression that "debate is being censored".
His item had, after all, added "we are still in a long-term warming trend".
This was too much for Ms Abbess. She responded that this was not "a matter of debate". He should not be quoting the sceptics "whose voice is heard everywhere, on every channel, deliberately obstructing the emergence of the truth".
Unless he changed his item, she said, "I would have to conclude that you are insufficiently educated to be able to know when you have been psychologically manipulated". She threatened to expose him by spreading his replies across the internet.
At this point the BBC's man caved in. Within minutes a new version appeared, given the same time and date as that which he had consigned to Winston Smith's memory hole.
Out went any mention of "sceptics" who question global warming. After a guarded reference to this year's "slightly cooler" temperatures, a new paragraph said that they would "still be above the average" and that we will "soon exceed the record year of 1998 because of the global warming induced by greenhouse gases".
Of course we have long known where the BBC stands on climate change. But it is good to have such clear evidence that, even when one of its reporters tries to be honest, he can be whipped back into line by a pressure group.
In the end, Ms Abbess still circulated the exchanges on the internet, to show the great victory she had won for the "emerging truth".
That is the one of the most disingenuous summary of what happened that I have seen. Here's an account by the reporter who absolutely denies that amended the story based on any threat, but says he amended it because he was persuaded that it could be improved.
See this for some hot debunking action.
To briefly (and probably not completely accurately) summarize: 1) one guy did get fired, but that's because he wasn't getting published or graduating many students. Sorry you didn't perform. 2) a guy who said "I was fired" from the smithsonian wasn't actually fired (and was never employed there anyway), still has access to the collections and an office there, etc. They did move him to a different office, so the fact that he said "they changed the locks on my office" is true. Even worse, this is the guy who, in his last month as editor of a scientific journal (not because he was fired, but because his time was going to be up anyway) basically took it upon himself to wave a publication into print without peer review, saying that he was the only qualified editor, when there were others who could have and should have been able to review this paper.
So the ID advocates portrayed here seem to be acting in deceitful or unethical ways, and then this movie is compounding their deceit.
There are a lot of interesting questions still to be answered in evolutionary theory; rehashing the same battles over and over again with these people is a distraction at best.
Your mind is squeezed by a blast of pain!
Apparently you need to investigate harder. There is very little argument at this point over whether Jesus existed or not. Wikipedia has an article which details historical sources used to reconstruct the existence of Jesus independent from the religious views about him:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicity_of_Jesus
Whether you believe him to be the Son of God or simply a man who started Yet Another Religion(TM), not too many historians will take the position that he simply didn't exist.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
This statement was widely quoted to discredit climate change/global warming but it's really just a case of cherry-picked data. It was anomalously hot in 1998, and it's deliberately mis-leading to make generalized statements from anomalous data.
It is accurate to claim that global temperatures in every year 1999-2007 have been cooler than the temperatures of 1998*. However, stating that the temperatures "have not risen since 1998" implies that temperatures have been cooling since 1998, which is not true. Temperatures from 2000 through 2005 certainly rose every year.
Here's some pretty graphs to back up my statements.
* It depends on the data set (land, ocean, atmospheric, US only etc). For certain data sets, 2005-2006 was hotter than 1998, but on average 1998 wins.
I don't care which side of the argument you're on, I just hate it when someone deliberately mis-represents the data to support their side.