April 2008 Archives

Creationist Nathaniel Abraham’s lawsuit against the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution—which PZ Myers discussed in this post, and which Hyphoid Logic discussed at length last month—has been thrown out by a federal judge in Massachusetts for procedural problems. The judge did not need to hear oral arguments, or to issue a long opinion; in a single-sentence order he merely ruled against Abraham because he did not file the lawsuit within the proper time period after receiving a notice from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and because the defendant—Woods Hole scientist Mark Hahn—could not be personally sued under the federal law in question. Abraham argued that he did not actually receive the notice, but he failed to allege as much in his complaint, and the defendants pointed out that courts presume that such letters are received about a week after they are sent—while Abraham filed his lawsuit more than a year after it was sent.

The decision is not a ruling on the merits, and might be appealed. The case is Abraham v. Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, et al., No. 07-12237 (D. Mass.)

I’ve been having a very interesting exchange with a noted First Amendment scholar about the degree to which the amendment does or does not bar the state from requiring children to be taught things. The question boils down to this: may the state require that children be taught certain substantive things (evolution/sex-ed/disputed historical events—what have you) in private schools? Or does the Constitution put limits on the state’s power to do so?

(Read the rest at Freespace…)

I think this willful act of deception has corrupted creationism irredeemably.
   - John Derbyshire

Conservative author John Derbyshire, writing in the National Review Online, pulls no punches. His article is ostensibly a review of Expelled, with an approving nod to Expelled Exposed. One of the problems in discussing creationism with ordinary decent people is that creationism has become so bad that one can’t explain how bad it is without sounding extreme. Derbyshire:

These dishonesties do not surprise me. When talking about the creationists to people who don’t follow these controversies closely, I have found that the hardest thing to get across is the shifty, low-cunning aspect of the whole modern creationist enterprise.

…

My own theory is that the creationists have been morally corrupted by the constant effort of pretending not to be what they are. What they are, as is amply documented, is a pressure group for religious teaching in public schools.

Political creationists must pretend not to be creationists. This is in addition to avoiding any real understanding of how nature works, so that they can go on believing in their “critical analysis of Darwinism”. The strain of all this pretending is starting to show very publicly. The excesses of Ben Stein’s Expelled go way beyond your daily quote mine, and will backfire with many people. Is creationism now a loser in national politics?

Continue reading A Blood Libel on Our Civilization at the National Review.

John Lennon’s widow Yoko Ono has filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against the makers of Expelled, on the grounds that they did not get Ono’s permission to use portions of Lennon’s hit song “Imagine” in the movie. The case is Yoko Ono Lennon, et al. v. Premise Media Corporation (S.D.N.Y., No. 08-03813).

(Read the rest at Freespace…)

I’m currently updating our website to use some new technology that I’ve come up with to improve our readers’ experiences: Xomment.

Comments will now be panelized.

Comment preview and response will be done on the same page. No more refreshes needed.

There will also be a bathroom wall hosted on this site, already linked to above.

The “academic freedom” and “critical analysis” bills currently being considered by the Florida legislature are old stratagems borrowed from antievolution efforts in other states. Ronda Storms and Alan Hays have been asked whether “intelligent design” could be taught in science classrooms. Storms and Hays steadfastly refuse to answer the question posed. You have to look at what has been done in the name of narrow religious antievolution and not what is said.

(Originally at the Austringer.)

On Pharyngula, PZ Myers treats us with an incredibly accessible explanation why chromosome number can change.

The posting was in response to an email PZ received about the evolution of chromosome numbers.

How did life evolve from one (I suspect) chromosome to… 64 in horses, or whatever organism you want to pick. How is it possible for a sexually reproducing population of organisms to change chromosome numbers over time?

Firstly: there would have to be some benefit to the replication probability of the organisms which carry the chromosomes

…

Secondly, the extra chromosomes need to come from somewhere. I’m not sure about this, but I believe chromosome number are not determined by genes, are they? …

Ben Stein lies about Sternberg and Kitzmiller Lauri Lebo reviews Expelled

PvM: My apologies to Lauri Lebo for misspelling her name as Laurie

This interview is just too good to ignore. The Real Detroit Weekly reports on the movie “Expelled”. The interview shows what had already become painfully clear to me having listened the SciAm interview: namely that Mathis is poorly informed on the issues of evolutionary theory. Whenever challenged by the SciAm editors, Mathis would first try to respond only to find himself overwhelmed by the facts and respond with “I am just an associate editor” and claim unfamiliarity with the facts. Why is it that ID works best in the shadows of ignorance?

Point in case

I confront Mathis with this point, and he counters that evolutionary theory is also untestable. This is patently untrue—to give just one example, scientists have witnessed speciation, the arisal of a new species from an old one.

When I point this out, he interrupts me immediately: “Whoa! Wait a minute! Please send me whatever material you have that demonstrates that we can observe speciation because I have not seen anything. I’ve never heard anyone even claim that!”

Is he serious? He’s just produced a film about evolution, and he’s never heard of the fact that speciation has been observed and thoroughly documented in the scientific literature? I’m stunned. I send him peer-reviewed research confirming this fact via e-mail, and he later responds, “This isn’t an important argument for me.”

The God Connection

Baylor University’s newspaper the “Lariat” reports on “Expelled”, exposing once again that Intelligent Design is a theological concept.

Robert Marks, a professor at Baylor and Intelligent Design proponent, commented

“I thought it portrayed things pretty well as they are ­– that science by decree of entrenched Darwinism has no room for a God hypothesis,” Marks said. “I on the other hand think that one cannot pursue truth without consideration of a creator.”

Marks said if science defines science as void of a creator, then it’s not a pursuit of truth.

Same with associate producer Mathis

“You have a science department that’s denying a god,” Mathis said

Reuters reports on an interesting development namely that Yoko Ono sues “Expelled” filmmakers over Imagine.

John Lennon’s widow, Yoko Ono, and his sons are suing the filmmakers of “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed” for using the song “Imagine” in the documentary without permission.

Lennon recorded the song in 1971 and in 2004, Rolling Stone magazine ranked it No. 3, in their 500 Greatest Songs of All Time, according to the lawsuit.

Yoko Ono, son, Sean Ono Lennon, and Julian Lennon, John Lennon’s son from his first marriage, along with privately held publisher EMI Blackwood Music Inc filed suit in U.S. District Court in Manhattan seeking to bar the filmmakers and their distributors from continuing to use “Imagine” in the movie.

They are also seeking unspecified damages.

Is this an issue of freedom of speech?

In Open Letter to a victim of Ben Stein’s lying propaganda Richard Dawkin’s responds to a letter by someone who, after seeing “Expelled” sent the following email

Now I truly understand who you atheists and darwinists really are! You people believe that it was okay for my great-grandparents to die in the Holocaust! How disgusting. Your past article about the Holocaust was just window dressing. We Jews will fight to keep people like you out of the United States!

I am posting this as a courtesy to Professor Hector Avalos. I did not add a single word to Avalos’s message, nor made any change in his text.

The Discovery Institute has written a glowing account of the debut of Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed in Ames, Iowa, the home of Dr. Guillermo Gonzalez, the pro-ID astronomer at Iowa State University. Prof. Hector Avalos, also of Iowa State University, tells a different story based on his eyewitnes account, and it does not bode well for Expelled nationwide. Continue reading Expelled pseudo-documentary bombs in Gonzalez’s backyard in TalkReason.

The first Box Office numbers are in. Expelled opened in 8^th place with $1.2M in revenues in 1,052 theatres resulting in a $1,141 per theatre revenue. You do the math. At an average of 5 showings this makes $220 per showing or 30-40 people. Expelled ranks 4^th in the list of “new releases”

While the weekend has just started the movie will have to do some hard work to match the expectations of the PR people:

“He said they would consider the opening weekend successful if the movie sold 2 million tickets (earning $12-15 million).”

[Update: Source: Brad in Stranger Fruit Comment section]

In context, Fahrenheit 9/11’s opening weekend grossed $23.9 million in 868 theatres grossing $27,558 per theatre and $8,565,000 on it’s first day

Remember that the movie is also heavily subsidized and Churches etc will receive large discounts.

Epsilon Clue puts the Rotten Tomato ratings of Expelled in the context of some real clunkers. A couple of selected entries:

Plan 9 from Outer Space: Ed Wood’s famously-bad movie starring Bela Lugosi, who died after shooting only five minutes of film: 62%. Granted, this is skewed by the camp value of the result.

…

The Dukes of Hazzard: Car chases and short shorts. Not exactly Oscar material. 14%

…

Left Behind: Sappy melodramatic Christian porn: 12%

and

And finally, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, the plucky new documentary that blows the lid off the anti-creationism conspiracy: 9%.

Shoot, Ben Stein can’t even beat the Britney Spears epic Crossroads (not the one PZed was interviewed for) which made a stellar 15%. Read the full post at Epsilon Clue.

From Dembski’s ‘backyard’ comes a review by the Waco Tribune of “Expelled”

Carl Hoover Wrote:

Though Stein presents himself as a man of rational logic, his film’s arguments are a rhetorical mishmash of straw men, red herrings, guilt by association, quote harvesting, gotcha interviews and post hoc ergo propter hoc (after this, therefore because of this) associations that may cause your head to pop. It’s a propaganda form highly polished by director/activist Michael Moore on the other end of the political spectrum.

Not bad for starters.

While ID proponents have spent much time on a ‘documentary’ which misrepresents science, the scientific community and fails to present any scientifically relevant explanations related to the concept of Intelligent Design, real scientists have been working hard to unravel another mystery: the origin and evolution of the placenta

In a paper titled Genomic evolution of the placenta using co-option and duplication and divergence researchers Kirstin Knox and Julie C. Baker (soon to be published in Genome Research) describe how they have started to unravel the mystery of the placenta

The invention of the placenta facilitated the evolution of mammals. How the placenta evolved from the simple structure observed in birds and reptiles into the complex organ that sustains human life is one of the great mysteries of evolution. By using a timecourse microarray analysis including the entire lifetime of the placenta, we uncover molecular and genomic changes that underlie placentation and find that two distinct evolutionary mechanisms were utilized during placental evolution in mice and human. Ancient genes involved in growth and metabolism were co-opted for use during early embryogenesis, likely enabling the accelerated development of extraembryonic tissues. Recently duplicated genes are utilized at later stages of placentation to meet the metabolic needs of a diverse range of pregnancy physiologies. Together, these mechanisms served to develop the specialized placenta, a novel structure that led to expansion of the eutherian mammal, including humankind.

The NY Times has a hard hitting review titled “Resentment Over Darwin Evolves Into a Documentary”

JEANNETTE CATSOULIS Wrote:

One of the sleaziest documentaries to arrive in a very long time, “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed” is a conspiracy-theory rant masquerading as investigative inquiry.

and

JEANNETTE CATSOULIS Wrote:

Mixing physical apples and metaphysical oranges at every turn “Expelled” is an unprincipled propaganda piece that insults believers and nonbelievers alike. In its fudging, eliding and refusal to define terms, the movie proves that the only expulsion here is of reason itself.

Steve Mirsky from Scientific America reports on Never You Mine: Ben Stein’s Selective Quoting of Darwin

Steve Mirsky Wrote:

One of the many egregious moments in the new Ben Stein anti-evolution film “Expelled” is the truncation of a quote from Charles Darwin so that it makes him appear to give philosophical ammunition to the Nazis. Steve Mirsky reports.

The Ayn Rand Institute has released a Press Release

“Intelligent design advocates will do anything to advance their views–except science.

“The reason for that is simple: doing science has never been their goal. Their goal is to make biblical creationism appear scientific in order to skirt the constitutional ban on religion in public schools. Contrary to the film’s claims, the real dogmatists are not the defenders of Darwin, but the religiously motivated advocates of intelligent design.”

ExpelledExposed.com has announced a contest to “Set Ben Straight

In promoting the creationist propaganda film Expelled, Ben Stein managed to stick his foot in his mouth over and over again, issuing what seemed to be a ceaseless stream of ignorant, offensive, and just plain daffy claims. Here’s your chance to set Ben straight. Send your favorite claim to [Enable javascript to see this email address.] along with a refutation. We’ll post the best for all the world to see. And five lucky entrants will receive a year’s subscription to Reports of the NCSE along with their choice of a book from NCSE’s shelf – including such useful books as Mark Isaak’s The Counter-Creationism Handbook, Eugenie C. Scott’s Evolution vs. Creationism, and the AAAS’s The Evolution Dialogues: Science, Christianity, and the Quest for Understanding. But you only have ten days, and a wealth of silliness to examine, so act now!

A series of interviews with ID true believers has him playing Michael Moore–dumb—no hard questions for the folks at the Discovery Center, whose infamous leaked 1993 “wedge memo” stated as one of its primary goals the propagation of the idea “that nature and human beings are created by God.” ID’ers protest that they’re simply interested in secular alternatives to Darwinian evolution; their scientific opponents, meanwhile, are potential Communists and Nazis. Bizarre and hysterical.

The Complete Works of Charles Darwin Online

This site contains Darwin’s complete publications, thousands of handwritten manuscripts and the largest Darwin bibliography and manuscript catalogue ever published; [Click to enlarge] also hundreds of supplementary works: biographies, obituaries, reviews, reference works and more.

BeliefNet reviews Expelled

There may be a good argument to make on behalf of teaching Intelligent Design in science class, but this documentary from Ben Stein does not make it. The movie itself is an example of design by faith and emotion rather than intelligence, defined as rationality grounded in proof. Instead of making a straightforward case for Intelligent Design as a scientific theory, Stein employs misdirection and guilt by very tangential association to try to make his case.

TV Guide reviews Expelled

It’s hard to pinpoint the most insulting aspects of this obvious propaganda piece from Ben Stein, the eye-drops spokesman, conservative writer and pundit whom most people remember from a bit part in FERRIS BUELLER’S DAY OFF.

While searching for “Expelled” on Google I was offered the following ‘sponsored link’

News About Expelled Movie
Latest news, articles and updates
on Ben Stein’s new movie - Expelled
http://manufactroversy.newsladder.net

Enjoy

In Paste Magazine we read:

The filmmakers confirmed that they did use the track without permission, but they insist that their legal counsel told them it was fair use protected under the First Amendment due to the fact that they only used 25 seconds of it.

In the Salt Lake Tribune we read about the dishonesty

Alas, the movie’s makers (Stein and co-writers Kevin Miller and Walt Ruloff, and director Nathan Frankowski) don’t debate honestly. Stein mocks university officials for not “getting off [their] script,” but says nothing about the repetitive talking points from the ID crowd. The ID folks complain that the term “evolution” is too vaguely defined, and yet never adequately define what “intelligent design” is. They swear they aren’t espousing religion, then try to discredit the leading evolutionary biologists - such as Richard Dawkins and P.Z. Myers - because they are atheists. Oddly enough, the tactics employed in “Expelled” undercut the movie’s argument, most notably in the interviews with Dawkins and Myers and in Stein’s trip to Darwin’s British home (now a museum). Either the filmmakers suckered these participants under false pretenses, or the evolutionists are more open to debate than Stein suggests. Perhaps the intelligent-design proponents know that in a truly open debate, their argument isn’t fit enough to survive.

In the Discovery Institute’s ‘backyard’ the Seattle Times reports on “Expelled”

A hard-core, fundamentalist bit of right-wing propaganda, “Expelled” slyly appropriates its style from liberal and left-wing sources, sending Ben Stein out to do deadpan interviews with a grab-bag of people, while intercutting old movies, new animation and newsreel footage.

This is all fine — a number of comedy shows and documentaries have been hard-core, left-wing propaganda, serving up more red-meat entertainment than useful information. But Jon Stewart is a lot funnier than Stein.

Nuff said

1. Expelled opens in Lawrence today. The newspaper gives it one star out of four, offering this review:

Droning funnyman Ben Stein monkeys around with evolution with the new documentary, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, a cynical attempt to sucker Christian conservatives into thinking they’re losing the “intelligent design” debate because of academic “prejudice.”

2. On the other side of the scale, the Intelligent Design network sent an email to many teachers and others in public education in the Kansas City area, saying, in part:

And, lest there be any doubt what the true motivation for Expelled is, check out this screen grab from the “Leader’s DVD” handed out at preview screenings…

E! Reviews gives it an “F”

Review in a Hurry: A flunkout of a documentary, this features Ben Stein—still best known for his monotone “Anyone…anyone?”—advocating creationism, er, intelligent design, in science classrooms. Stein’s credibility is blown on this poorly constructed diatribe, and you’d be smart to save your bucks.

Lies, damned lies and “intelligent design’

It’s nuttiness right from the opening moments of Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. Images of Nazi atrocities and the terrors of life behind the Berlin Wall are smugly deployed in an attempt to editorialize away basic scientific fact. In a saner universe, you could scoff at Stein and not give his nonsense another thought. But we don’t live in that universe. We live here, where the religious insecurity of a scientifically illiterate populace is being twisted by people who certainly know better.

The Chicago Tribune’s Roger Moore reviews “Expelled” ‘Expelled:No Intelligence Allowed’ (Ben Stein monkeys with evolution) and gives it a 1 star (poor) rating

Stein and friends use animation (shades of “Bowling for Columbine”), amusing chunks of B-movies and even “The Wizard of Oz” and classic propaganda techniques to undercut 150 years of peer-tested research. Their goal? Create just a sliver of doubt about evolution. It’s a classic Big Tobacco/”Inconvenient Truth” denial tactic.

Another ‘stellar’ review by the Star Tribune titled Movie review: Propaganda piece “Expelled” flunks

According to “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed,” the source of all evil in the modern world is Darwinism, a philosophy that, the film posits, is responsible for everything from atheism to abortion, euthanasia to the Holocaust.