Got an hour or so? A BBC special on the Dover trial has made its way to YouTube. See how the rest of the world sees that bizarre episode of American inanity.
Here’s the first part.
The other four are below the fold.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Do you know if this program is available on DVD or anything?
I’d like to show it at my college, but youtube just won’t do it.
Peter S. Williams:
“Indeed, if the arguments of ID theorists are as easy to demolish as Horizon intimated, one must surely suspect its supporters of being either stupid or duplicitous. On the other hand, if one suspects that ID theorists are neither stupid nor duplicitous, one must surely suspect Horizon of over-simplification.”
Thank you, Peter! Yes, they are stupid and duplicitous (and so are you).
Unfair. Horizon *IS* famous these days for its really bad simplification of science. It used to be an excellent show, but recently (last 5 or so years) it has gone downhill.
He’s lying for Jesus. Which is ironic because according to the Christianistas, you don’t need to lie for Jesus because the Truth of the Gospel(TM) is self-evident and pure and will always be triumphant, blah, blah, blah…
“Indeed, … the arguments of ID theorists are as easy to demolish as Horizon intimated, … its supporters of being either stupid or duplicitous. On the other hand, … how is it there are PYGMIES + DWARFS??”
Fixed that for you (with creationist ellipses no less ;-).
Behe’s cracking me up with his “if two people believe… It means you’re not crazy…” shtick.
Last I checked, more than one person can be bi-polar, schizophrenic and/or psychotic… That two crazies found each other is only proof that two crazies found each other. It is certainly not proof that evolution is wrong.
Horizon may be guilty of oversimplifying the facts in a lot of instances, yet compared to a lot of other “popular science” programs it still does a pretty decent job.
Bible-thumpers don’t even know their own mythology. They should read Ecclesiastes 3.
17I said in mine heart, God shall judge the righteous and the wicked: for there is a time there for every purpose and for every work.
18I said in mine heart concerning the estate of the sons of men, that God might manifest them, and that they might see that they themselves are beasts.
19For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; even one thing befalleth them: as the one dieth, so dieth the other; yea, they have all one breath; so that a man hath no preeminence above a beast: for all is vanity.
20All go unto one place; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again.
21Who knoweth the spirit of man that goeth upward, and the spirit of the beast that goeth downward to the earth?
Downloaded and converted to iPod format for later viewing. Done and done.
“Do you know if this program is available on DVD or anything?
I’d like to show it at my college, but youtube just won’t do it.”
I called the BBC, it’s not for sale but if you call BBC Education on +44 870 830 3000 then they should be able to sort you out.
With modern community based mental health treatment and group therapy and mentally ill community day centers, the mentally ill have no trouble whatsoever in finding each other and clumping up into groups.
Nothing wrong with that. These people are marginalized anyway and it helps them to have some sort of a social life and safety net.
But it has one unforseen consequence. The seriously mentally ill frequently meet and get married to….other seriously mentally ill people. Two schizophrenics are quite likely to produce schizophrenic offspring.
Thanks PZ, I’ve never heard of the Wedge Document before. (I’m relatively new to Atheism) That’s a good card to have if and when anyone ever cites the Discovery Institute!
>> “Do you know if this program is available on DVD or anything?
I’d like to show it at my college, but youtube just won’t do it.”
I called the BBC, it’s not for sale but if you call BBC Education on +44 870 830 3000 then they should be able to sort you out.
I’ve got the number wrong…. looking for the right one
It’s not so much the simplification of Horizon I object to – that’s understandable for a mass audience programme – as the distortion and trivialisation of science to aid the sensationalist or human interest angle. All the actual science gets squeezed into the last ten minutes and the rest is crappy filler with whizzy special effects and portentous voice-overs.. I’ve written before about the travesty that was the Horizon show on the search for the Higgs boson, but even that was nowhere near as bad as some of the shows recently.
got it…
BBC Television: 020 8743 8000
BBC News: 020 8743 8000
BBC Education: 0870 830 8000
BBC Worldwide: 020 8433 2000
I wonder if Behe would be willing to extend his “if two people . . .” argument towards Scientology.
Probably not.
I thought it was pretty good. There was a long dry period where we had to sit through Behe and Dembski though. As for it being over-simplified: meh. It’s a TV show, not a dissertation. I thought it presented their side very fairly. They even appeared to be respectable… at least until Ken Miller appeared.
Even if it is over-simplified, at this point it’s more than they deserve.
I wish they’d driven home the point that ID is an argument from ignorance more though. Ken Miller did the best job of that, but he didn’t say it quite as convincingly as he could have.
Ginger Yellow wrote: “It’s not so much the simplification of Horizon I object to – that’s understandable for a mass audience programme – as the distortion and trivialisation of science to aid the sensationalist or human interest angle. All the actual science gets squeezed into the last ten minutes and the rest is crappy filler with whizzy special effects and portentous voice-overs..”
I agree completely. I had to stop watching Horizon about seven years ago because it would infuriate me to the point of screaming at the TV. Very sad; it used to be a good programme.
With modern community based mental health treatment and group therapy and mentally ill community day centers, the mentally ill have no trouble whatsoever in finding each other and clumping up into groups.
They also have the DI, an organization created so that mentally deficient “scientists” can clump together.
Also good clumpers of the mentally-challenged: churches, synagogues, temples, and mosques!
Here is the whole thing at google video, so you don’t have to watch it in four seperate sections. Plus the quality is a little better:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5652362334647629514&q=war+on+science&total=1596&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=1
Google video has several different versions of it as well.
I thought it entirely appropriate for the producers to have interviewed Behe in an amusement park, a place where people to flee reality.
For the Canadians among us there are a few Horizons knocking around on various bittorrent sites, I’m pretty sure the Dover trial was on it, along with many others- including the rather excellent “Nice Guys Finish First” from the 1980’s presented by Richard Dawkins. You can definitely see the degradation in quality- I can’t see the Horizon of 20, or even 10 years ago touching the “My Pet Dinosaur” programme with a forty foot bargepole.
You could read the transcripts from many of the recent series on the site. I hope the Beeb put up some of their older programmes as they have with their “Listen Again” service on Radio 4.
Dembski et al. really crapped out with ID, didn’t they?! Haw!
Anyone?
Hello?
(crickets chirping)
Strider, are you saying that the ID movement is a success, or am I misunderstanding you?
Ugh. No. I was making a “joke” on the imagery of Dembski rolling the dice in Part III and the resultant crashing failure of the ID movement. To “crap out” is to throw a losing roll in the dice game “craps”.
Anyone?
Hello?
(crickets chirping)
At the beginning of part IV, Georgie-boy refers to a “calling from beyond the stars to stand for freedom”. Correct me if I’m wrong but I’m not so sure that Great Cthulhu is exactly an advocate of freedom. Who knew Dubya worshipped the Elder Gods?
It was available on BitTorrent several months ago, which is when I first got a hold of it and watched it.
Ahh, no worries then. I mistook your signature line, with the “Crickets chirping” bit, for some sort of taunt.
And on-topic, I’ll have to wait ’til this evening to watch the video — the boss freaks out if we watch any sort of video at the office. But there’s nothing more fun than reviewing how badly the ID’ers got spanked in the Dover decision… :)
“Do you know if this program is available on DVD or anything?
I’d like to show it at my college, but youtube just won’t do it.”
Download it direct from YouTube.
This is nowhere near as hard as you might think, but there are a few steps involved – please be patient with me. I’m assuming no previous knowledge here.
Step 1. Download cygwin from here (assuming you’re using Windows). Get the *whole* lot. Here’s how:
– http://www.cygwin.com/
– click on the install icon in the middle of the page to download the setup program
– startup the setup.exe you just download, select everything in sight, download and install it.
Step 2. Start it up (there’s a new icon on your desktop, and in your menu)
Step 3. You’ll get what looks like a DOS box (it isn’t but never mind)
Enter: “startxwin.sh”, hit return.
You get a nice little white command line. This is a unix command line so it’s different from what you expect
Step 4. Create this script in a file “youtube”, containing this:
#!/bin/perl
use WWW::Mechanize;
$_ = shift @ARGV;
s[http://|www.|youtube.com/|watch?|v=|][]g;
$m = ‘WWW::Mechanize’->new;
print “Looking for page …n”;
my $page = $m->get(“http://www.youtube.com/v/$_”);
my $request_uri = $page->request->uri;
my $t = $request_uri;
$t =~ s/.*&t=(.+)/$1/;
print “Downloading file …n”;
$m->get(“http://www.youtube.com/get_video?video_id=$_&t=$t”, ‘:content_file’, “$_.flv”);
To create this script:
– enter “vi youtube”, hit return
– enter the lower case letter ‘i’
– cut and paste the text above (cut is per Windows normal, paste is accomplished by pressing the middle mouse button or scroll wheel)
– hit escape
– enter “:wq”, hit return
Done
Step 5. Enter “chmod +x youtube”, hit return
Step 6. Create a second script in a file “dover”, containing this:
#!/bin/sh
./youtube yAnIoXPLMdo
mv yAnIoXPLMdo.flv DoverTrial-1.flv
./youtube ajcKn-qO3g8
mv ajcKn-qO3g8.flv DoverTrial-2.flv
./youtube MsrmlST5sP4
mv MsrmlST5sP4.flv DoverTrial-3.flv
./youtube QTAC3h6gbKw
mv QTAC3h6gbKw.flv DoverTrial-4.flv
./youtube MqSgr-Jladk
mv MqSgr-Jladk.flv DoverTrial-5.flv
To do this:
– enter “vi dover”, hit return
– enter lower case letter ‘i’
– cut ‘n paste above (cut is per Windows normal, paste is accomplished by pressing the middle mouse button or scroll wheel)
– hit escape
– enter “:wq”, hit return
Done
Step 6. Enter “chmod +x dover”, hit return
Now – the coup de grace …..
Enter “./dover”, hit return
Wait.
At the end you’ll have 5 files:
DoverTrial-1.flv
DoverTrial-2.flv
DoverTrial-3.flv
DoverTrial-4.flv
DoverTrial-5.flv
These can be opened and viewed in anything that understands flash (most browsers)
Put it on a big screen and you’re ok.
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2007/09/dover_trial_intelligent_design.php#comment-564601
I agree with comment #3. “Horizon” & “Panorama” were, until a few years ago, shows I could trust to provide good, rational programming.
“Dumbing down” aside, I have no idea why.
*SOBS*
Well, after watching this and viewing a bunch of videos from ExtantDodo, I think we might be on the right track. Unfortunately, there is really only one way to deal with these fundies imo, and thats to employ the kind of in your face challeneg that EDodo , Dawkins, Myers et al are advocating. Giving these fundies an inch will simply encourage them to believe that because we dont’ want to be seen as mean, we’ll allow them to yack and spew their crapola. I think we have to meet these yokels head on. Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!
I had high hopes for the program until about two-thirds through it, when I realized it contained a fatal flaw. The biology and probability were at once kindergarten-ish and unconvincing, making the whole show work as an apologia for ID proponents who want to appear to the world as the majority of righteous and good people battered into silence by thuggish scientists with too much grant money and too much protection from being fired from universities. Science as militant as Scientology.
The ID’ers look clean-cut, thoughtful, caring, and courageous. That’s at the nub of Behe’s statement about finding others with his belief – it underlined his appearance of steadfastness. The lonely voice in the wilderness being sent succor in the form of a kindly “drop-dead brilliant” law professor and a tall, nerdly mathematician. To the ordinary American, that’s a stellar lineup. The program didn’t point out that Dembski is not a statistician, Behe is considered a crank even by Lehigh, and Johnson is a lawyer with minimal scientific training.
I can’t say I really fault Horizon for this. They have to pander to the audience, just as any popular show has to. And as I’ve said before, the principles behind modern evo-devo take much education and thought to comprehend properly, far more than a TV show can take on. For example, the show depicted the virtual winding and unwinding of a chromosome, but I’m sure that only a tiny fraction of the audience could have identified it as such. Thought is hard. It was only after I’d been to college and studied statistics more intensively that I intuitively grasped the absurdity of the tornado-and-junkyard argument. Most college graduates never even get that much. Indeed, I teach stats to undergrads and can tell you that most students will never remember how to think probabilistically.
Thanks a ton deviljelly, will check it out!
Bernarda (Commenter #8): if you haven’t heard Brahms’ setting of verses 19-21, in the Four Serious Songs, I highly recommend it. (He was an avowed secularist but used Scriptural texts for a meditation on mortality and love.) Try the recording by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau or, if you can find it, John Shirley-Quirk.
This was the first film I saw on Creationism/Intelligent Design on German TV (well, ID/Creationsim isn’t a big issue over here. I didn’t even know the word “creationism”, let alone the concept behind it, until I accidently stumbled upon it about three years ago, while searching for something wholly different.).
Thanks for finding it!
HaHa! Yeah, I caught that too, Strider. Shrub’s statements on the issue are yet another bit of evidence to add to my growing pile of reasons why we should kill our psychically sensitive citizens before The Elder Gods can get their inscrutable alien minds around them. It does make me wonder why Cthulhu hasn’t tried to get him to raise R’yleh though….
“To the ordinary American, that’s a stellar lineup. ”
Bear in mind the programme was made for a UK audience. The media and public environment here is much more hostile to ID and other creationist ideas (though not necessarily anti-scientific ideas). It’s not enough to come across as polite or well meaning. You have to actually put forward a persuasive argument. That can be an emotional rather than a scientific argument, as with the MMR or Wi-Fi scares, but it has to be an argument. To generalise further, Brits are also less receptive to appeals to martyrdom.
I bought a copy of The God Delusion, and it came with a second DVD of Horizon’s War on Science. I suspect I might have bought ripped and re-DVDed movies (in retrospect), but I still have a functioning copy of War on Science on DVD.
The great thing about the Horizon series is how they showed the ID proponents – Behe on the amusement park ride and Dembski powerwalking up the railroad tracks. The first was silly, and the second one reminded me of Sir Lancelot storming Swamp Castle in Monty Python’s Search for the Holy Grail.
Tim #32 If you really think the US public will look at this and thinks if favors ID you do not hold them in very high regard.
I dunno, this wasn’t that good a summation. it spent hords of time showing intelligent design without showing really any of it’s flaws. in the end it came accross as saying ‘well, the judge says it wrong so its wrong.’ not ‘the evidence disproves it’
not that good a show in my opinion.
I wonder if their “shallowness” is due to them expecting their viewers to dismiss ID out of hand at face value without needing to be led through the motions of explaining the hows and whys. I’m not sure, but given the underwhelming success of creationism in Europe in general, this could be plausible.
Wow JM at #29 thanks for the tips.
Yes Jesus died for us 2000 years ago and damnit it’s about time we did something for Jesus.
By the way it’s always a pleasure seeing Mr. Phillip E. Johnson’s face again. That always just makes my day. Yes sir.
Thank the FSM for the BBC.
The borderline ones, the incompetent and dishonest can even dominate large, powerful institutions.
Not really – see above.
Nor my in UK-based opinion. It was flabbily done. Not at all hard-hitting. Pitiful really. Horizon has been on a downward spiral for well over a decade. During the 90s it was overtaken in quality by C4 and C5.
OK That’s a very weird sentence mutation. I certainly meant to type “Nor in my …” and not “Nor my in …”. I must have missed the correct edit insert point when adding the “in”. :-D
It’s not a matter of high or low regard, sailors. I look on human behavior as primarily a matter of psychology rather than a matter of regard. We are driven to do certain things by our nature. Cultural expectations and conditioning alter those trajectories. America is full of fearful humans, and fear provokes certain predictable reactions. One is a mental scramble for certainty and togetherness, the same impulse that makes sheep huddle. Religion is an extremely powerful binding force, at least superficially. ID is an attempt to mollify the American need for religious hegemony while grudgingly giving some ground to verifiable non-mythological results. Americans need ID, so they are likely to seize on whatever justifications pass in front of them. Other cultures react the same way with their sacred cows.
You can see the effects of fear all over America, in the mindless robotic obedience to The Shrub, in lucrative amounts of gun sales, in the hysterical surrender of Constitutional freedoms, and especially in the intensified drive to make this a “Christian Nation”. According to a recent poll, apparently some fifty percent of the American public thinks the Founding Fathers architected this country as a Christian nation. A huge number of Americans have succumbed to the urge to bond together with the only glue Americans have: Christianity and, to a lesser extent, patriotism. These are often combined in church services with bunting draped over the altar and sermons about fighting evil people. Read American history closely and you’ll see the cycle repeating. So yes, I can easily believe that Americans will see what they want to see in that Horizon episode. But I recognize it as a fear reaction, not as a lapse of morality or intelligence.
By the way it’s always a pleasure seeing Mr. Phillip E. Johnson’s face again. That always just makes my day. Yes sir.
Another thing it was nice seeing was all those popes waving their hands around like they has magic powers. Woooooooooooo…. hypmotized… woooooooo…
Another thing it was nice seeing was all those popes waving their hands around like they has magic powers. Woooooooooooo…. hypmotized… woooooooo…
Also it was nice seeing George Coyne point out that Intelligent Design will not only destroy science but religion as well. Yes, when everyone realizes that Intelligent Design is baloney and that it is not science but that it is a religious movement, religion will then indeed be utterly wiped from the face of the planet. Stop trying to destroy religion you stupid Intelligent Design people!!
Papal magic is really irritating if your mage didn’t prepare the appropriate spells the night before, and aggro like nothing.
Still, popes drop bitchin’ headgear sometimes.
I never get tired of giving Philip Johnson a look which could kill him. “Every culture has a creation myth…”, sure. But what kind of facile relativism is it that makes him think that’s a good argument for anything? For my second question, why does he think that creation myth is the basis for all of a culture’s knowledge? Johnson actually answered that one in an interview with the Chicago Tribune back in 2005 when he said something to the tune of, “I realized that if Darwinian evolution were correct, all of Christian metaphysics must be wrong.” I certainly agree with that assessment — even if I’m not limiting myself to “Darwinian evolution”, but the progress that’s been made in the theory in the time since Darwin first put pen to paper. It’s only that Johnson seems to have a bad case of the backward logic, so I don’t doubt at all that he an Meyer arrived at the same conclusions by much the same process: they formulated their conclusion, and then warped the world until it fit that conclusion.
*laugh*
Well, it’s a good argument for ignoring Genesis as an explanation for anything real. I often say it myself: “Every culture has a creation myth… and Genesis is ours.” Meaning, of course, that it has no more basis in fact than any myth involving trees, snakes, turtles, ravens, titans, etc.
Indeed.
I loved Dembski’s claim that he had an “intuitive problem” with evolution. Why not just admit that it conflicted with his religious beliefs and he set out to prove it wrong? His motive doesn’t matter if his science is valid, which of course it isn’t.
Seriously though, Attenborough and Dawkins getting the last word in makes this whole documentary worthwhile.
Sharp as a tack, as usual.
Hey, guys. You can download a high-quality version at http://www.sonofshun.com. It’s a torrents site though, and you’ll need to register (freely). But it’s a very clean site, and VERY worthwhile. They also have the Chaser’s War on Everything torrent about their APEC stunt (you can get it on their website too, but the torrent quality is far better). YOU HAVE TO SEE IT. They even do a less talked-about but maybe even funnier follow-up.
Lots and lots of other very interesting content too, including a massive 78 GB torrent of Horizon episodes since the 1980’s including the full great Richard Feynman interview that’s also doing the rounds (in parts) in youtube.
http://www.tv-links.co.uk/ for more docs good and bad
The show was a bit disappointing. As previous posters have mentioned, it laid out ID’s arguments, and then had various scientists simply claim they were false. In the end, it would be easy to conclude that ID is true, and the scientists and the courts are unfairly oppressing it. I wanted mention of Behe’s claim that there will never be an evolutionary explanation for the human immune system, followed by the pile of papers explaining it. Similarly, I’d have liked a more solid refutation of the bacterial flagellum’s supposed irreducibility, rather than the few seconds it was given.
As the Scopes trial showed, the opinion of the court does not demonstrate who is correct. Still, if the show’s producers wanted to rest their conclusion on the findings of the court, they could have quoted the decision. It’s full of juicy quotes about the breathtaking inanity of ID.
Still, the program was better than I’d expect to find in the US.
Dustin:
LoL… yeah, I know it was a mundane observation, to those of us who don’t buy into it at all. There are only two options: “Every culture has a Creation Myth…” and Genesis either is, or is not, just another one. I am continually astonished by those who so ardently pursue the latter.
I sorta prefer the one in which Zeus eats all his brothers, or whatever it is he does. That’s cool!
(Zeus, forgive me for not remembering exactly. *gulp*)
I would think laying out IDs arguments is enough to show that it’s BS.
There’s no there there.
“I sorta prefer the one in which Zeus eats all his brothers, or whatever it is he does. ”
Kronos the Titan (Zeus’s dad) ate all of Zeus’s brothers, but when Zeus was born his mother Gaia gave Kronos a stone disguised as a baby to eat instead and hid Zeus away. Then when Zeus grew up, he used a concoction to make Titan throw up his brothers and initiated a war with the Titans, eventually casting them into Tartarus. Pagan mythology is so much cooler than Christian mythology.
I started watching this and I realized I have it on DVD. I got it about a year ago as a freebie when I bought a bootleg copy of Root of All Evil on Ebay (forgive me, Richard).
Like others, I was a bit disappointed in this show. The ID proponents were treated far too politely and their arguments were countered, but not destroyed. Five more minutes outlining Barbara Forrest and the Wedge document, the inanity of Behe on the witness stand, the withdrawal of Dembski and others from testifying, the outright lying on the stand of Buckingham and Bonsell and the duplicity of DI and Thomas More Law Center in getting the case going in the first place would have left the ID case in tiny little bits to small for even worms to eat.
Every chance we get to expose their ‘breathtaking inanity’ we should do it.
I really didn’t see the problems in the show that everyone else had. I thought they went to great lengths to give the ID proponents enough rope to hang themselves. The whole “if two people believe in something then you’re not crazy” did NOT come off sounding too lucid. We got the whole irreducibly complex flagella argument, and then got it demolished in record time only to hear “I still see irreducible complexity”. I think they came off as living in denial.
We got to see the way that the fundies insinuated themselves into power in a school board in order to try to exert power over OTHER people’s children, they made the point that this was not a primarily fundamentalist district.
Sure, it wasn’t a PZ style brutal beating, whipping followed by salt in the wounds.. but it looks more impartial yet still leaves the ID supporters looking rather poorly.
ha ha the narrator sounds like phil donahue- the catholic dude
Can someone tell me what the music that plays during the Vatican segment (fourth video) is ?
sorry, it’s in the last video
An easier way to get copies of the video:
http://keepvid.com
Till.. I am not sure, but the style says “Bach” to me. (Species uncertain but probably of genus ‘Bach’) I would guess the Bach Mass in B because that is one of the best known.
good
good