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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.
to Expelled, a movie full of ad hominems, half truths, non sequiturs and promoting ignorance!
Hey! Look a Distraction!
There was a debate? When?
Oh, right, in America. Oh you silly Americans. I guess the age of the American Empire is truly over. You're hell bent on driving your population into the next Christian Dark Age, while China is preparing to whip your ass. Good luck with that.
Isn't one of the points of the movie that while scientists espouse neutrality, lack of bias, objectivity, etc. that they are not actually following it?
(Disclaimer --> haven't seen the movie or any trailers, the above was a genuine question for anyone who has actually seen the movie, and not an attempt to troll. Also the question should not imply that I agree with or disagree with the movie. It really is JUST a question.)
He's missing the issue. The truth is, I believe some form of "intelligent design." But whether or not I believe it or a billion people believe it is irrelevant. Intelligent design, as has been discussed here and elsewhere, ad infinitum, it's NOT SCIENCE and should not be taught as science or as an alternative to evolution.
On the other hand, if they want to teach it in a Religious Studies type class, I'm all for it. Go for it. That's precisely where it belongs.
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.
---
"The chances of a demonic possession spreading are remote -- relax."
Its not just "Darwinists" that force their anti-Jesus dogma on the education system. I had a similar experience in my childhood.
Given a circle with a radius of 10, whats the circumference? Some would say thats its 10 * 2 * "pi"!
But what is this pi? They can't even define it;its completely irrational! Meanwhile they suppress the controversy. When I put down a much more reasonable answer - 60, because the literal Bible tells me the circumference of a circle is 2*r*3, I was marked wrong! The Nazis used these numbers to build their war machine and concentration camps and its being taught to children far to young to understand its deceptiveness. Inquiring minds are led to a literally endless and patternless series of numbers intended to confuse and dull the mind.
Teach the controversy!
Meh... As long as both are prefixed with "theory of", who cares?
Um... because evolution can be observed, and any rational mind can understand the mechanisms by which it works, and the magic-man-in-the-sky "theory" make no provision for testing, cannot be evaluated as anything other than wishful thinking, and teaches kids not to engage in critical thinking.
Your willingness to tolerate creationism in school as long as they call it a theory is actually worse than the delusions of the people who put it forward in the first place, because - by themselves - they come across as ignorant loons. You're giving them credibility.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Unfortunately, a lot of people don't understand the distinction, and people like Dawkins don't help. Many religious types treat 'discounting an argument for god(s)' the same as 'advancing an argument against god(s)', and go ballistic. But it's important to note the difference. There's still room to believe in god(s) even if you accept the ridiculously overwhelming evidence that evolution happened and is happening. (I don't believe in god(s), FWIW, but many people do.)
Stein and his ilk really remind me of the worst features of Ned Flanders sometimes. "Well, I say there are some things we don't want to know! Important things!"
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
To cut short any discussion from those who think that a religious precept should be included in a scientific curriculum, I submit this quote from one of the linked articles so everyone is clear as to why ID is not science:
"Intelligent Design" fails to meet the basic definition of a scientific idea: its proponents do not present testable hypotheses and do not provide evidence for their views that can be verified or duplicated by subsequent researchers.
That's all there is to it folks. ID supporters need to submit evidence to back up their claim and it will be considered. So far, the only thing ID supporters have done is a) try to show supposed holes in current Evolutionary theory (all of which have been answered) and b) claim that some unknown, untestable, omnipotent force is behind everything. At no time have they ever presented evidence to support their idea and so, rightly, ID falls under the heading as an idea which attempts to support someone's religious ideas.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Remember if intelligent design is correct then it can be explained, demonstrated and then analysed further. Until then it is as much a waste of time as it is trying to work out how much flour Flying Spagetti Monster is made up of.
If this were really happening, what would you think?
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.
Isn't it ironic that a whole generation of religious folks are doing nothing more than routing their kids into a backwater. Suspicion of science just means their children will distrust science and math and be shuttled, therefore, into a legion of burger flippers. Teaching your kids that Intelligent Design is the right answer is as close to child abuse as I can imagine.
Because the evidence for evolution is overwhelming?
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
Except there is a discussion in academia, Ben Stein just doesn't like the outcome of that debate so he claims it's "unfair". Scientific debate isn't the Skull and Bones society, anybody can join in if they have some good points to make and some good arguments to back them up. All I ever hear from folks like Ben Stein is how they are being unfairly excluded from the debate...yet rarely have I actually seen them making any attempt to join in. Since this is Slashdot, I can't end this post without an analogy...so here goes. Forget we're talking about science and think about the place where you work. Imagine there is someone who shows up late, leaves early and doesn't get a lot done while he's there. Now imagine that person spends basically all his time at the office complaining that it's unfair how he's not getting promoted and that the boss has it in for him. That's how I feel about Ben Stein here.
Let's assume the Earth is only a few thousand years old. Where did the oil come from? Was it created in the ground with the rest of the Earth? If so, is there a way to predict where it might be found? Or perhaps it really did form from plankton (with a few plants and dinosaurs), but about 10,000 times faster than any chemist believes it could? Any way you look at it, a young Earth and a Flood would imply some very interesting scientific questions to ask, some interesting (and potentially extremely valuable) research programs to start. How come nobody's actually pursuing such research programs?
Why don't creationists put together an investment fund, where people pay in and the stake is used as venture capital for things like oil and mineral rights? If "Flood geology" is really a better theory, then it should make better predictions about where raw materials are than standard geology does. The profits from such a venture could pay for a lot of evangelism. Why isn't anyone doing this?
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
They ignore you because you obviously don't know what you're talking about.
Then they mock you because you expect to be taken seriously without putting in the work to become informed.
Then they fight you, because you won't go away until you've had your fight, and ingrained in your thinking, so deeply you don't know it's there, is the notion that might makes right.
Then you win, because there are so many ignorant, lazy, belligerent people that sooner later sensible people, who want to get something accomplished with their lives, will sooner or later give up on picking sense out of your nonsense.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
There's so much I would like to say here, and I rather doubt that I'll get it all said, but I'll make a stab at it. In the first place, I haven't seen the movie, so can't really comment on Stein's take. However, I have looked at the "sociology" of the Evolution/Intelligent Design/Creationism debate a fair amount, and what I see disturbs me from all sides. One major concern I have is the elevation of Darwinian natural selection as a means of species creation to an unrealistic importance. I just don't see why it's so important in and of itself. One could certainly be a competent physician, for example, and not believe in Darwinism (or neo-Darwinism). It seems to me that one could even be a quite competent practitioner of any of the biological sciences (other than the various sorts of paleontology) without necessarily agreeing with Darwinism. Yet, we are constantly told that a failure to teach Darwinism at the high school level will destroy science education as we know it and result in a US population that is hopelessly ignorant of all science, etc. etc. I just don't buy it. Bluntly, I can scarcely think of a job where a belief in Darwinism is necessary. On the other hand, we have school systems that literally teach absolutely no information science, computer science, etc. etc., and people graduating from college who literally don't know the different between a byte and a gigabyte. It's hard for me to see why this ONE THING is so vitally important, when it has virtually no practical application and there are scientific topics with enormous practical application that go untaught. Could the real problem be social or (speak softly now) political? It seems to me that that is exactly the case. The extraordinary efforts put forth by various scientific bodies to defend Darwinism from all criticism strike me as a knee-jerk reaction to a knee-jerk fear that the Scope's trial will happen all over again. This isn't about science--it's about continuing the Enlightenment project of supplanting all sources of Meaning (capitalization intended) with Scientific Meaning. That doesn't mean that I think that Darwinism is wrong. I actually think that it's as right as you're going to get within the boundaries that it sets itself. But I certainly don't think that the loss of Darwinism would destroy American education or anything along those lines. So ... people... GET A GRIP.
My $0.02.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
Uh... because there is exactly zero evidence supporting other theories? Because other theories are largely unscientific, untestable, and not falsifiable? Because creationists still don't understand that evidence against one theory do NOT automatically equate to support for an alternate theory*? Because evidence from every branch of science, from astronomy to chemistry to geology to physics to zoology all support the currently accepted theory? You know, those sorts of things kind of tend to make people really, really tired of dealing with folks like Ben Stein, who remain obstinately and willfully ignorant.
(*e.g., if this fruit is not an orange, that does not mean it is automatically an apple... heck, could be a kumquat, for all you know).
... is the closing of minds
ideas are dangerous to closed minds.
80 years ago the "establishment" was opposed to teaching the theory of evolution - now the "establishment" doesn't want to discuss the possibility that evolution is "bad" science.
I also like the fact that the "enlightened pro-evolution" people are usually the ones resorting to argumentum ad hominem...
It ain't what they call you. It's what you answer to. http://mylyceum.us/
During the whole montage he's writing something over and over on the blackboard and it comes out to be something like "I will NOT question Darwinian Evolution." He interviews scientists and editors who have lost their jobs for printing/writing papers that claim our DNA has a 'code' with information that could not have happened in nature.
Disclaimer, I read a lot of Darwin/Dawkins/Gould so I'm pretty biased here
I think that even though it's 'a waste of time,' it's bad to write these people off or fire them. I'm sure there's sound criticism against these papers and authors but Ben Stein isn't showing that in his movie if there is.
If you have friends who believe in Creationism, respect them and provide for them sound arguments against it. It may be a waste of time to you but it's complete snobbery to write them off. Ben Stein is correct that you may lose friends if you watch that movie and become polarized by it--don't let that happen!
Like a Michael Moore movie, objectivity is raped, killed, gutted and donned over a rich man's face who then can safely tell you what to think.
My work here is dung.
Because I can find lots of stories that make me I am glad the crazies here don't express their religion by bombing people... like , in, uh wonderfully enlightened Europe.
/. that this qualifies as a story. I guess a few editors need to get their brownie points with the insecure techie crowd... the one that needs to vilify anyone with belief and the willingness to express it. (plus its also good fodder for anti-Bush people who claim some hair brained connection to him however tenous)
Really, do you guys not get the news we do? Burning cars in France, oh I know, the PC word is immigrants. Killing of writers in Europe because they dared to write about someone's god?
What you have here in America is exaggeration. Look at it this way, if its brought up over and over and made to look silly it probably is. The haters need something to jump up and down about to make themselves feel superior and these ID people are a great target. The ID people are not a great percentage, just a convenient target.
It says even more for
mod to me to hell if you like, but it is true that it takes a big does of exaggeration to make ID people out as a representative of America or religious America.
Bring out the haters, this thread should have lots of them.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
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.
In order for something to be a theory, it must be testable and falsifiable. "My invisible friend did it" is *not* a theory.
Just because the "establishment" does not want to discuss totally futile nonsense like the squaring of a circle or perpetuum mobiles, this does not mean they have closed minds. Its is just extremely boring and a useless waste of time to go through the same nonsense over and over again.
Creationims is nonsense. It adds nothing to scientific insight. Theism is useless. It adds nothing to scientific insight.
Yes, scientists can be very closed minded and stubborn and even stupid. And "the scientific community" can falsely disregard insights and new ideas for a while. That has happened and still happens all the time.
But creationism is so fundamentally wrong and nonsensical in so many ways that the contrary can be said: somebody actively supporting anything that so fundamentally goes against all scientific rational thinking disqualifies him- or herself as a scientist.
A physicist building a perpetuum mobile should get fired. A biologist teaching creationism or ID should get fired on similar grounds.
He's totally right, science in academia should be more about discussing what you believe and less about what science people have found out after observation and experimentation.
For example the other day when my chemistry teacher told me that material stuff is made of atoms, I really couldn't believe him. I think I should have been given the right back then to discuss with them about my theory that everything is conformed by milk derivatives.
I shouldn't really have to prove my theory or even get the smallest amount of evidence pointing to the certainty of my theory before being given the opportunity to have kids at school discuss about it.
And all what I said in this post is the truth, because if you read this post you may lose your job.
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
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.
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?
so what underlies an otherwise intelligent religious person to resist evolution?
we need to confront the real underlying psychological issue here: faith in humanity
religious folk view something like evolution as a path to meaninglessness, nihilism, cynicism. your typical secular humanist expresses their faith in mankind directly: there is no conflict between evolution and being positive about mankind's future
but religious folk's minds don't work like that. for a religious person, their faith in humanity is indirect. it is tied up in symbols and code words, like god. god is really just a psychological manifestation of an abstract concept: an ideal man, what humanity strives for, progress
and around an idea like god, you get all of these related mythologies that again, are really just props for retaining and reaffirming and indirect positivistic faith in society and mankind
so what really divides the secular humanists and the religious folk are those with no faith in mankind. when you look at something like evolution, and you consider your traditional religious symbology that enforces your faith, you are confronted with a crisis. and you look at some of the nihilism in the world. not the atheists who believe in mankind, but the cynical, empty, boorish loud kind of atheist who sees no meaning in life, and you react to that. and so you react to evolution: it seems to be a path to this sort of empty faithless indolent nihilism
in other words, the negative reaction to evolution by otherwise intelligent religious folk is really a reaction against the idea of meaningless in life
this is the psychological issue which underlies the rejection of evolution by otherwise intelligent religious folk. and so the real way you defeat their resistance is by criticizing faithless nihilism. those who use evolution as a story about how mankind is meaningless, pointless: you attack and reject them
you talk about evolution, AND you talk about faith in humanity and you talk about evolution as reinforcing meaning, not destroying it. and in such a way, you draw down the resistance of intelligent religious folks to evolution, by demonstrating to them that evolution is not a threat to the idea of faith, that plenty of secular humanists with faith in mankind can also beleive in evolution, without some sort of psychological dissonance
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
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.
Evolution is based in science. It has evidence and is discovered/researched by way of scientific means. People who believe the scientific method can accurately be used to discover and research things can go so far as to say that they believe in them because science supports it.
ID is based on religion and tradition. It does not come from evidence or from any application of science as we define science. It's presented as an alternate explanation evidenced by religious texts and motivations. People who believe in God or religion and believe what their respective religion tells them to believe about creationism or ID can go so far as to say they believe in ID or creationism because their religion supports it.
The real conflict with evolution versus ID is that ID proponents want ID taught in science class. That would be akin to Darwinism and evolution being taught in a psychology or theology class. It's just out of place. Most reasonable people I know on both sides of this can accept that there's a difference between philosophy and science and that they don't need to be mixed and that one is free to take their own beliefs from one, the other, or some combination of both.
The issue I take with this movie is not that it presents ID and/or creationism, but that it makes those who believe in it out to be the victim of oppression because "you can't talk about that in science class" and because the scientific community will shun you for teaching it. Truthfully, the scientific community only wants to make sure it's not presented as science because it devalues work they take seriously. And Ben Stein is using/abusing his reputation for being a very intelligent person convince religious folks that they are being oppressed, so they'll lash out against anyone who says that ID and creationism shouldn't be taught in science class. Everyone's free to believe what they want, but school is not the place for misrepresenting the beliefs of some or even many people as the result of scientific research.
And finally based on all I've said above about my perspective, my reply to you is that Ben Stein is out to make money and nothing else. If he really believes as you say, then he could have skipped this movie. Of course, evolution is not a "answer for why life exists and why the universe works that way that it does" or anything like that. I watched the preview; it was very clearly edited with a single goal in mind: to victimize those who have religious beliefs counter to accepted scientific theory. He is not pointing out that universities don't allow dissenting views. I can't imagine there exists a university without theology or psychology classes to discuss creationism and ID very thoroughly. The failure here is not for professors to teach ID or creationism, but for science professors to validate any education based on ID or creationism with scientific evidence.
-N
I've nothing to say here...
he's a rebel. He's stickn' it to the establishment by conforming to an establishment... He's a tricky one. Thank GOD for people like him that compel us to think inside the box.
BTW on his game show "Win Ben Stein's Money" I recall him doing poorly on the SCIENCE and SPACE categories.
I will illustrate your point, with an example I saw on CNN:
But you don't really illustrate the point - the OP was talking about scientists, and you illustrated the point with a story about a journalist and an environmental activist.
Oh - and can you pls link to the CNN article?
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
Scientific American has a good review of the movie (from the viewpoint of the evil scientists of course): http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=ben-steins-expelled-review-john-rennie
Read my blog.
it's supposed to be observed over millions of years
No, it can be observed hour by hour. If you'd like to do a little test, we can expose you to all sorts of little life forms that used to be easy to kill with simple anti-biotics, but which - in some cases, only months later - are now genetically different, and have adapted to survive that treatment. As those bacteria (and in some cases, parasites) reproduce, there are observable mutations involved. Some of those mutations result in an altered version of the critter that happens to tolerate things that might kill those versions that mutated in a different way. If the chief cause of end-of-the-line death in strains of bacteria happens to be anti-biotics, then we're watching that life form, via simple natural selection, adapt its way around that threat. If you don't have the patience to learn how to look at the longer-term histories of species, and can't muster the simple common sense to see how that would impact more complex organisms over time, then just ask any doctor to explain it to you. Hopefully, for your sake, that won't be in the context of actually having such an infection - because, unlike even just a few short years ago, when such bacteria didn't exist, it's getting very hard to kill them without also killing you. Just like everywhere else in nature, a new pressure must be brought to bear on a species that has evolved (rapidly, in this case) to overcome an older pressure.
Let's not tolerate creationism but at least consider intelligent design
They are the same thing - both suggest the hand of an all-powerful imaginary magic super being with a sick sense of humor.
If you look at the genetic code, the similarities the re-use of design patterns
Don't you see? Of course commonly useful bits of DNA are commonly found. The stuff that works, at the basic level of providing for things like nerve growth, or respiration, or enzyme production, doesn't need to be evolved away from... mutations that shut down things like that tend to kill the offspring, and thus don't get passed along. The stuff that works, stays, and stuff that works better becomes more prominent through simple natural selection. If your ability to live long enough to reproduce depended on your ability to sprint to the nearest tree to avoid being eaten, then a mutation in your DNA that happens to produce a fractionally greater dose of adrenaline when you sense danger will give you an advantage over your brother, who might have a different, but less (for the circumstancecs) useful mutation. Guess who passes along the DNA after the predatory animals have come through your part of the woods? Mr. Faster Tree Climber. It might be a hundred generations before something even slightly as useful crops up again in that particular part of your clan's DNA, but as long as it's an advantage, it gets passed down the line. If its a liability (say, it also happens to increase your sensitivty to the sun, and thus causes early cancer), then it dies off. Of course, you know all of this. You're just invested, for social reasons, in the mythology side of things, and it's awkward for you to admit it.
In truth, I think scientists are afraid. They're afraid that if they admit there are aspects and evidence of design that they will be condoning creation as a whole rather than the simple design aspect.
No, they're just afraid of an entire new generation of kids growing up thinking that supersition, and belief if supernatural cause and effect might endanger our culture's ability to produce rational thinkers. You know, the sort of rationality that allowed us to build the systems over which you're reading this message, right now. You're proposing that we embrace a world view more or less like that which fueled the Dark Ages, or which applauded the burning alive of women, as witches, who knew that willow bark contains aspirin or who gave birth on the wrong day of the week, when it happened to rain really hard an
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Actually... it's much more likely that they don't know what "theory" means.
The reason they don't get published is because their work isn't science. That's the problem with ID as a scientific hypothesis -- there's no way to test it.
IDers present stupid arguments, and then complain they are being persecuted by scientists. Apparently, idiots hate it when you call them idiots.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
This isn't a problem as long as you restrict God solely to the metaphysical, which is what most religious scientists do. (This is, I think, the effective stance of Catholicism.) If you don't use religion to make disprovable statements about reality, they're quite compatible.
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.
Actually, there is a good bit of symmetry here. I often say that the Intelligent Design(ID) people admire how the Man Made Climate Change (MMCC) people have pushed their cause. If you believe in the scientific method you have no problems with anyone challenging a theory. In fact, you'd welcome it because it either disproves the theory or makes it more accurate.
Evolution has advanced in it's "completeness" as a theory because of many challenges made to it over the years, and those challenges have helped science immensely. Just because a theory is wideley accepted however, does not mean that it is correct. Prior to Plate Tectonics being widely accepted it was scorned and rejected by leading scientists who had careers built on "old science." This incidentally what the subject line of this post refers to: subduction is one continental shelf sliding under another, and orogeny is mountain building (of course since this is /. let me point out IANAG).
Yet because the heart of Geophysics is still physics, these great scientists were able to accept challenges and look at the new theory and say "yes -- this fits better." And that's what's awesome (and to me holy) about SCIENCE. You can challenge ANY assertion, and if your model is better, it will persuade people. I'm sure some physicist can help me out and show how the theory of gravity has changed massively since Newton -- even though a lay person would say "yeah, I get gravity."
So here's where Expelled and ID fall down -- we KNOW their theory. What is being taught in schools about evolution is mostly demonstrable. We can show evolution in anti-biotic resistant strains of bacteria, that directly impacts humans and health. ID is being taught in the appropriate places -- houses of worship -- where challenges are heresy. Yet in teaching SCIENCE in schools we want to teach that every assertion CAN be challenged and should be observable. That's what science is -- an attempt to understand the universe through observation and experimentation. If someone wants to challenge something in science and can bring legitimate observations to the table, they should be welcomed for the CRITICAL (pun intended) role they play in the process. ID has to reject the scientific method, science always looks for challenges to make the model more accurate -- but ID is by definition perfectly accurate already, and cannot be challenged.
I support everything the MMCC people want as an end result -- I'd like to see us embrace alternative energy, stop burning fossil fuels and generally be more conscious of the impact we have on the planet. I also think that there is a real harm being done to science when people with legitimate complaints about the SCIENCE of MMCC are treated as pariahs. Although I tend to think that MMCC is real, and there is certainly no harm in proceeding to curb our carbon emissions, I welcome the legimate claims of people who think that solar cycles are responsible, or that this period is not particularly warm on a geological chart of temperatures. These are legitimate scientific ideas based on observation and empirical data. MMCC as a theory will gain much more respect when it embraces challenges, instead of treating them in the same way ID treats challenges -- by throwing the scientific method under a bus. On the other hand, if the MMCC people do succeed in making challenges to their "science" become heresy, the ID people will be sure to take notes in how that happened.
Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm
It's an unprovable theory (as unprovable as the existence of God). ID is not a theory - there is no evidence for it, it isn't testable and it isn't falsifiable.
And as for ID not being the same as creationism, would you like to explain this - http://www.pandasthumb.org/archives/2005/11/missing_link_cd.html
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!
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?
You need to know Stein's background to see what he's after. Although a conservative, he's also an exceedingly intelligent iconoclast aiming to reveal problem behavior where it's typically not admitted.
His purpose in Expelled is not to promote creationism, either in and of itself or in comparison to evolution. His intention is to point out that SOME OF the scientific community is participating in the same sort of hair-on-fire hysteria as the most vocal creationists. While the latter are widely know and fairly expected to employ this as a tactic, or just emotionalism, the scientific community "should" be above it, but isn't.
He rightly shows that the "evolution/creationist debate" isn't. He shows that it is instead a construct. Creationists claim it in order to put their ideas on equal footing with science, and science unwittingly helps them when some of its members react to what they expect rather than what's actually being said. His movie is a case study in precisely this, both within itself and as a social phenomenon, and you can bet your ass this is exactly what he intended.
It's easy to poke holes in the highly vocal creationists' stance, and quite popular to do so. It's more difficult to poke holes in their scientific counterparts, and supremely unpopular if you assume his intention is to promote creationism. Promoting creationism is his tool, exposing intellectual bigotry is his intention, and before the movie even premiers, he is succeeding admirably.
If one isn't convinced, consider the fact that he's targeting only those that overreact to the situation. For the most part both religious and scientific adherents (and those who hold to both) coexist and even discuss their viewpoints without any acrimony or "debate". They see no contradiction because the two thought systems are orthagonal -- entirely independent and incomparable. It's those in science who can't grasp this due to perceived peer pressure or fear that overreact and so unwittingly lend credence to that which they oppose by the sheer act of opposing it.
And keep in mind that although the movie pokes at one side, that doesn't mean he considers the other side to be right. He's going after the one target too few have the balls to attack. My money says that when it's died down, he'll make a statement that he has no intention of supporting creationism, only that he intended to do what I've described above.
The movie is a masterful piece of agitprop (agitating propoganda). It gets its targets to react wildly to it as though it were their traditional perceived enemy, while its true intent to show that those targets are themselves reacting wildly when they, as the supposed intellectuals, should be reacting with due consideration, if at all. And at this point it doesn't matter if the movie even comes out; it's already done exactly what Stein wants it to.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B