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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."
On one side we've got a bunch of scientists - who's philosophy espouses striving for neutrality, lack of bias, objectivity, etc.
On the other side, we've got.... an ex-Nixon speechwiter/game show host.
*sighs* - I bet he's skeptical about anthropomorphic climate change too (there seems to be an extraordinarily high overlap between the two groups).
Oh, and he Godwins himself at 2:40 in the linked video. Discussion over.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
I though, and then googled him.
... I've always wondered why law is considered a science), but his opinion on intelligent design and evolution means diddly squat.
So he's a comedian, a writer, a white-house speech writer, a law professor and a believer in intelligent design.
Fine, another one of those scientist who think that being a scientist, they can have a scientific opinion on any subject out there.
He's a lawyer, he can have scientific stances on law (if that's possible anyway
Feel free to believe in an Old Man in the Sky, and to embrace ID. Just don't forget to mention that scientific evidence points the other way.
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"The chances of a demonic possession spreading are remote -- relax."
This whole debate seems pretty strange to European eyes. I consider myself to be a fundamentalist Bible believing evangelical Christian, but, in Britain, people like me take the view that Genesis describes the evolutionary process pretty well. Although many Evangelicals support Intelligent Design or Young Earth Creationism, there's little opposition within Christian circles to full acceptance of the scientific explanation of the origins of life.
Between this and support for a right-wing social and foreign policy agenda, I sometimes wonder if American evangelicals read the same Bible that I do.
Your use of the term "theory" in this context shows that you have no idea what it means for something to be a scientific Theory. People who call intelligent design a "theory" are simply trying to convince your average Joe Sixpack that it is equally as plausible and on the some footing as the scientific Theory of Evolution. It is not. As far as I know, no other Theories currently exist to explain the diversity of life. No one is hiding other theories, because there aren't any. There are some fairy tales that were meant to try and explain it several thousand years ago, which in no way resemble a theory of any sort.
"To hope's end I rode and to heart's breaking: Now for wrath, now for ruin and a red nightfall!"
It isn't a straw man, it's an analogy in the form of parody.
The point is that the ridiculous "pi equals three because the Bible says so" is just as bad an example of cherry-picking as the folks who will quote specific out-of-context Leviticus quotes to "prove" that the Bible is against homosexuality, or point to Genesis and say it "proves" that the universe was created in 6000 years.
You say everyone recognizes that "pi = 3" was not the point of the Bible, and yet there are thousands of Biblical literalists out there who do that exact same thing with whichever passages they find convenient, while hand-waving away those parts that contradict what they want to believe.
I will illustrate your point, with an example I saw on CNN:
(1) A BBC reporter wrote a fair, non-biased article on global warming. In one paragraph he stated, "Not all scientists agree that global warming is caused by man-made actions," which is an accurate statement. Not "all" scientists think man caused the problem. Some don't even think it's a problem, saying it's just part of a natural cycle that's been happening for the last 10,000 years.
(2) The reporter published the article on the website, and immediately an email rolled-in from an environmentalist demanding that phrase be expunged.
(3) The reporter and activist went back-and-forth several times, with the activist saying, "There is no doubt," and "We may be uncertain of the cause, but we must not let the common people know that we are uncertain."
(4) The reporter refused to rewrite his article until the activist told him, "If you do not comply, I will rally my group and you will receive thousands of emails demanding the change."
(5) The reporter, obviously concerned about this prospect (and possibly losing his job), immediately deleted the offending paragraph.
And thus:
An activist, acting somewhat akin to a religious zealot, took a balanced BBC article & turned it into a one-sided piece using the tactics of threats and coercion to silence any contrarian views about global warming. It does not surprise me to learn that similar tactics are being used to silence researchers and/or scientists.
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
I still am in awe on how idiotic people are in 2008.
There is no need for conflict between the two.
It is not incomprehensible to see the universe was created by a higher power, who set into motion the laws of natural selection and everything we see in it.
Ugh.
I firmly believe in science and a higher power that created it all, so it baffles me every day (well, it doesn't entirely, an average IQ of 100 does explain it well) that people are debating something that doesn't need a debate and are arguing something that has no conflict.
Now, does anyone have a link to that paper?
First, I would like to say that I a fan of Ben Stein. But this movie is blemish in what I think is an outstanding career. I will explain.
I too have asked the same exact questions that your trailers ask. But I do have answers. I've followed the I.D. vs evolution debate, and I come down firmly on the evolution side. But that is not what you ask about...
Scientific inquiry first clashed with religion when a man innocently attempted to determine the motion of the heavenly bodies in an effort to determine God's intent. This man was Newton, but he started a long battle of God giving up ground to science. For as long as science is practiced, the domain of God has reduced. It is likely that at some time in the future that we have "God" reduced to the fundamental constants of the universe. (Only in terms of a mechanical sense, not spiritual) This can only be the case if scientific inquiry is allowed to continue.
The problem I have, and as it seems schools (public and private), and government have as well with I.D. people being key in scientific discovery , is that it threatens further scientific discoveries. The threat is not intentional, or, at least I believe in most cases it is not intentional (but the Dover school district it was quite intentional). The reason why it threatens scientific discovery, was shown in the Dover court case. The cellular structure that was heralded as 'irreducible' was actually shown to be reducible. Once the researcher was content with the idea that the structure was irreducible, scientific inquiry ended. This is not acceptable. It is not acceptable in projects funded by public or private grants. I fear if I.D. was ever accepted as a viable answer, all sufficiently complicated systems would be described as I.D. and we'd throw our arms up and declare ourselves done. I could imagine a time when all things are attributed to I.D. and such a time scares me.
I do not think that all professors who suppose I.D. would be haphazard, but it is not a risk we do not have to take. The question is if there is room for I.D. and a mind that is willing to probe deeper. Can someone have reverence and probe deeper? Newton did, so it is possible, but I doubt all of the I.D. proponents could.
The biggest failure of I.D. is to factor in the value of processes. And really this is what it boils down to. With I.D. there is no process, and it is all design. With science it is all process and no design. For the past 400 years, we've had nearly every process that has been attributed to God be re-attributed to a process. The question then is God a process, or is God designed? If God is a process then there can be no irreducible complexity, and I.D. effectively eats itself. Processes happen in the domain of time, so the question then becomes what is the domain of time for life on earth. We see evolution happening here on earth, so when did that start? And then the question is what was the process for earth? Answering that question is a question of celestial processes arising in planet formation and going back to the beginning of the universe.
Given then that we are the result of processes, how relevant or prevalent is I.D.? Is there any I.D. still left? It would seem that if the I.D. of our creator was irreducible, then we could never replace any part of the design. This would mean we could only add-on to make alterations (adaptation) and this would create more complication from the base simplicity. The neat feature is that any design is completely mutable. You can bury the original design so deep it could not be discerned. What I am describing of course is DNA. However the smallest number of genes for an independent organism is 1500 genes. This would be a boon for I.D. as until there are 1500 genes, there is no way to evolve and combine 1500 genes at once. However, these genes do contain junk DNA, showing that they were created by a process. The only thing I can conclude, and indeed others should be able to conclude, is that we don't understand the process. This is where scientists who don'
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
So when does the scientific community get to stop talking about ID/Creationism and move on?
To draw a parallel: The Ether was discredited around 100 years ago as being unnecessary. No serious physicist talks about it any more. Science has moved on, and is now talking about (for example) string theory. In a hundred year's time it will have moved on again and string theory will either be accepted as a working model, or rejected.
Biologists have done the science on evolution, they have questioned it, poked it, prodded it and tested it for over a hundred years, and it stands up to that. It's a good working model, and now everyone would like to move on and stop talking about it.
The desire to not talk about evolution/creationism is not a desire for orthodoxy, but a desire to move the science on.
Business/App ideas are like arseholes: everyone's got one, they're mostly shit, but very rarely they contain a diamond
Pirsig has a great line in his novel which I paraphrase as "nobody screams and shouts that the sun will rise tomorrow", it's a given and there is no discussion. It seems to me that the people who are afraid of discussion are the screamers. If people argue that the world is flat there is no need to shout them down and freak out at them etc, if you _know_ something to be true you should not be offended or upset if someone else believes otherwise. If your knowledge (belief/faith) is in doubt perhaps then you would scream/shout/freak out. That is what I've taken from the trailer linked here, it totally reminded me of the fanaticism part of "Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenence".
Cheers,
_GP_
Richard Dawkin's " Open Letter to a victim of Ben Stein's lying propaganda" is relevant.
The creationism / evolution debate has been done many times here on Slashdot. There'll be comments making one or more of the hundreds of old and refuted creationist arguments(1). It's possible that a couple of comments will use arguments even the Answers in Genesis creationist group says not to use(2). Someone will say there's no evidence for Macroevolution and someone else will point out 29 plus evidences for Macroevolution(3).
The point of Expelled is to make people think they've learned about the creation / ID / evolution debate, but to feel that Darwin= Holocaust. Note how they interview scientists of all sorts, but they don't interview academics who cover antisemitism in pre-20th century Europe. Even one hint or reminder that, say, Martin Luther wrote On the Jews and Their Lies in 1543 would ruin the Darwin -->Holocaust propoganda.
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(1) "evolution requires faith," "Piltdown," "Midocean magnetic anomalies are not reversals"...
(2) "there are no beneficial mutations," "no new species have ever been produced"...
(3) Even if there were no fossils, how to explain how biochemistry matches phylogeny? It's one thing to claim the designer re-uses code to explain similarity, but why would a designer reuse broken code?